Collapse List by Novo Amor | Album Review
Inspired by a move to the Welsh countryside, the artist crafts a stunning album that explores both his upbeat and more introspective sides.
“My albums tend to start upbeat and then fall apart into a more realistic version of who I am,” Ali Lacey, the musician behind Novo Amor, commented during the listening party for his new album Collapse List. It’s an interesting insight into the mind of the singer and songwriter. It’s also a guide for how to understand the album, which is the artist’s most wide-ranging project to date and another excellent entry in the Novo Amor discography.
In a recent interview with Clash, Ali said the title of the record was inspired by his experience listening to Serial’s “S-Town” podcast, in which the protagonist sends a journalist lists of things that he feels need to change to prevent the world from collapsing. As the album came into focus, Ali began to see it as his own collapse list, his own catalogue of change and growth. But the title could just as easily represent the way the album’s initial exuberance eventually collapses into melancholic yet comforting introspection.
Collapse List opens with the buoyant acoustic guitar and melodic vocals of “First Place” before transitioning to “Same Day, Same Face,” which is propelled by a satisfyingly glitchy piano riff and closes with an electric guitar solo. It’s a testament to the insistence on finding this more upbeat energy that the piano on “Same Day” is a repurposed sample from “Keep Me,” a down-tempo standout from Novo Amor’s 2020 album Cannot Be, Whatsoever. It’s as if the artist is determined to show that he can use the raw materials from his signature pensive and subdued sound to create something with a more exuberant energy.
But even so, the lyrics reveal a sense of tension underlying the lively track. “Your love is a lifesaver,” Ali proclaims. However, just a few lines later, the singer’s self-doubt creeps in: “Can’t change my awkward timing/ If somebody asks, please just say I died.”
After completing his previous album Cannot Be, Whatsoever in the midst of the pandemic, Ali Lacey made the decision to move from the Welsh city of Cardiff, which had been his home for 14 years, to a repurposed barn in the countryside. It was a period of intense transformation for the artist that heavily influenced the songs on Collapse List, which was produced and engineered by Ali himself in the studio he built with his father at his new home. The album’s songs were written by Ali alongside longtime collaborator Ed Tullett.
“[Collapse List] speaks of my recognising what needs to change in my life,” reads Novo Amor’s bio, “from my location, my feelings towards making music, the nature of my relationships and such.” The music that grew from this period charts the range of emotions that often accompany such a change of location and mindset.
After the momentum of the opening tracks, the album moves to a slower, moodier instrumental interlude, and what Ali referred to as the more realistic version of himself begins to seep in. While the individual songs on Collapse List can all stand on their own, the album really shines when listened to in its entirety. The sequencing is masterful, with two short instrumental tracks, “Placeholder” and “Sand and Sky,” serving as interludes dividing the experience into three acts.
And with a run time of 33 minutes, the experience of listening to Collapse List in one sitting is very attainable. In a moment when double albums with 20 or 30 tracks are commonplace, Novo Amor takes the opposite approach, crafting an 11-song experience in which every second of listening time inevitably holds more weight. Listening to this album is the experience of straining to grasp every lyrical choice, every musical note, and the way the songs speak to one another as they wash over you.
The atmospheric “Placeholder,” blends seamlessly into “Years On,” the album’s lead single and an exhibition of Novo Amor at its best. For much of the song, the arrangement is dominated by heart-tugging string swells over a foundation of acoustic guitar and piano. Yet there is still evidence of Ali the studio tinkerer — the song opens and closes with a striking bass riff accented with a pulsing bell-like sound and gentle synth.
The ethereal vocals soar over the instrumentation, stringing together poetic lines of longing and regret: “You’re out on the border where time left/ And I shouldn’t care like I do.” The song ends with the acceptance of this loss: “My god, I can’t stop it, I let it win/ I bet it won’t mean a thing/ You said it don’t mean a thing.” Yet as with many of Novo Amor’s more melancholic songs, “Years On” leaves you feeling more hopeful than you would expect — it’s the reassurance that comes from hearing a painful experience being made into a work of art.
In the middle section of the album, Novo Amor’s desire to remain upbeat and tendency to fall into quiet reflection seem to be at war with one another — alternating between the syncopated energy of “Me v2” (which again samples the piano from Novo Amor’s previously released “Keep Me” to great effect), and the slowly building “Co-Pathetic”, which starts with Ali singing in a lower register over dark-toned electric guitar and drum brushes before it crescendos into a chorus of stacked vocals.
The push and pull between upbeat and downtempo let Ali experiment in subtle ways without alienating fans of Novo Amor’s previous work. Even as he covers new sonic terrain at times, the ever-present strings and instantly recognizable vocals still give this set of songs a strong cohesion and a connection to the rest of his discography. In his 2020 documentary Please Don’t Stand Up When Room Is In Motion, Ali explained his creative process in the studio in this way: “Shapes and colors and sounds would open up in the distance and become the world around you as a piece of music evolves, and as a piece of music evolves, so does that world.”
Through Collapse List’s shifting sonic textures, we can hear this world being made and remade as the artist strives to settle into and make meaning out of his new surroundings. It’s on the aptly-titled “Land Where I Land” where the singer most directly addresses the change in geography that inspired this album: “I guess that I’ll stumble along/ And I’ll land where I land, when I land.”
But in the end, Collapse List gives in to the gravitational pull of wistful introspection that will feel like home to so many of Novo Amor’s longtime fans. The album’s final segment consists of the piano and stirring strings of “Ornaments” and the acoustic “Just Another Way.”
I always give extra weight to the final song on an album — what is the message the artist wants me to leave this listening experience with? On “Just Another Way,” Ali strips the sound down to the bones: “If I don’t feel it by now/I won’t be around/I’ve signed off, it’s feeling so loud,” he strains over acoustic guitar and pedal steel accents in the album’s closing moments. “And I can’t be your landing ground.” After the end of one chapter in life and the start of a new one, after all the drums and chopped piano samples fade away, we’re still left with a singer and his guitar, once again attempting the seemingly impossible task of capturing a realistic version of himself in a song.
You can listen to Novo Amor’s “Collapse List” on Spotify, Apple Music, or wherever you stream your music. Novo Amor will be on tour throughout 2024 — check out tour dates and buy tickets here.
