Andrea Nicole King - Harvest Love (2025) Hi-Res

The latest project from Andrea Nicole King is an LP named ‘Harvest Love’, a record that seeks to ‘honour grief honestly and authentically’. To call ‘Harvest Love’ a ‘break-up’ record may be to understate its gravitas or emotional heft and to damn it by association with other break-up records, but that is essentially what it is. As might be expected, coming from this brand of sensitive folk-tinged singer-songwriter, the experiences that shape ‘Harvest Love’ and the album’s ‘purpose’ get a much more comprehensive and discerning explanation and examination than ‘break-up’ record.

Herein lies both the strength and the weakness of ‘Harvest Love’. There can be a tendency amongst artists working in this arena to overthink their music or to expatiate something that perhaps should be more immediate and affective in nature and King comes perilously close to this on much of this record. Such a tendency can get in the way of the emotions that are being dealt with. This is unfortunate as King is so concerned with feelings and their cause and effect. It is also unnecessary as the strength of ‘Harvest Love’ is its emotional eloquence and affective engagement with its audience.

Music, in its entirety, can surface affective resonances in the listener that are difficult to represent and may not even be cognitively processed – something that we can feel without really understanding what, or why, it is. ‘Harvest Love’ does not ‘sound’ like a sad record, one consumed with grief and its consequences. Musically there is plenty of bright pealing folk rock with appealing arrangements that are intricate without being cluttered, with abundant interesting touches throughout the record. King’s voice has a warm and breezy cadence that is very easy to embrace and her piano playing is both expressive and sympathetic to the overall sound. Yet the overriding impression we are left with is one of King’s grief and her response to it.

The back story for the record’s creation gives a context for this with the break-up of a long and serious relationship. A break-up that involved much travelling between her base in California and family home in Ohio. There was intense soul searching about the nature of the break-up and the relationship that came before, a period of time in a ‘care-givers’ job that helped bring her experiences into focus and an intense liberation of cathartic writing while sheltered away in the family home. This writing progressed from a diary of grief episodes into full blown songs that captured “every stage of grief as I mourned the death of that relationship” and allowed King to rediscover her resilience and “reclaim her power and turn her pain into something meaningful”.

On grasping that she was in fact creating a record King began to sense the emerging sounds to go with the words and hurriedly searched for somewhere to record, alighting on Realgrey Records, a studio to record at with an empathetic set of values – “You matter, and your music matters” – and a network of collaborative players who could help bring her vision to life with “love, care and tenderness”. The overall tone of ‘Harvest Love’ is plaintive and elegiac, a rich and gentle sound coloured in sombre folk and American hues.

The resulting record is not a comfortable listen though. It often feels like we are intruding on very intimate and personal experiences. It reflects and represents the intense emergence of feelings King experienced whilst making the record. But perhaps not always as meaningfully as King was hoping for. Despite King’s intricate engagement with the specifics of the record the ‘sense’ of ‘Harvest Love’ is apparent but much of the specific meaning can be difficult to comprehend, we are left with a feeling rather than a full comprehension of the record’s intentions. Not a bad place to be but quite where it could have been.