Falling You - Metanoia (2025)

Falling You is an American ambient/electronic project based in San Francisco, California, United States. The band was founded by composer and musician, John Michael Zorko, with then-partner, Jennifer McPeak, serving as lyricist and vocalist. After their 1998 debut album, Mercy, the couple broke up and the band seemed to go on hiatus. In the early 2000s Zorko began collaborating with a rotating roster of female vocalists on new music, though McPeak continued to contribute sporadically to subsequent albums. Notable guest vocalists include Dru Allen, Victoria Lloyd, Suzanne Perry, Anji Bee, Monica Richards, Amanda Kramer, Shikhee, Kirsty Hawkshaw, Aimee Page, Sara Ayers, and Erica Mulkey.
The work of Falling You tends to center thematically on some core part of the human condition. As a general rule the song lyrics and vocal melodies are written by the vocalist, working in collaboration with Zorko to fit his composition and album theme. Over the years, the musical project has explored and combined genres including ambient electronica, ethereal darkwave, melodic space-rock, and dream-pop centered largely on Heavenly Voices style vocals.

In the same way that the legendary label, 4AD had their in-house collective, This Mortal Coil, a revolving door of music makers generally associated with it, so John Michael Zorko gathers around him many of the great and good who orbit the Projekt Records sun to weave together the sonic beauty of that defines his Falling You project.

And it is not just the form that draws comparison to that earliest of British independent labels, the music found on Metanoia, the latest album, could easily have been one of the 4AD stable, back in the day.

Metanoia means to change, but more specifically, a transformation forged from adversity, an idea first found in the writing of ancient Greece, and specifically in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which this album takes as a guide and reference point.

“Throw The Stone” opens things up, perhaps more traditionally song-like than some of what will follow, but still shot through with enough ethereality and floating vibes to make it a gentle first step into a world where structure and solidity are often subsumed by dream and drift.

Take “Demiurge (Momento Eorum)” for example, a song whose voice-as-instrument vocals, Latin chant, and emotive soundscapes feel like a collaboration between Karl Jenkins in his Adiemus phase and Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell.

“Alcyone” is both vocally elegant and musically elegant, a blend of heaven-sent harmonies and mercurial melody. “They Give Me Flowers” pushes into a sort of hallucinogenic blues, part real-world twang, part otherworldly lucid dreaming, and “Constellations” is as spacious and drifting, beautiful and awesome as the title suggests.

Metanoia is an astonishing record, one that never ceases to surprise you, constantly evolving and shifting between the sonically translucent and the almost groove-driven, the half-heard and heavenly to the more robust and worldly.

If you were a fan of the suignanture sound that 4AD made their own back in the day, you will adore this. But then I can’t imagine anyone not finding something to fall in love with, no matter what their past tastes and record collection might suggest.