The Perfect Timing of Fenne Lily’s BREACH
The album that was made for quarantine
I had never heard Fenne Lily’s name until the day her sophomore album, BREACH, was released in September 2020. But it was one of those rare albums that instantly made sense on the first listen, and I haven’t stopped listening since.
BREACH unabashedly confronts the terror that comes with being alone with one’s own mind. It’s an album that is unafraid to dig through the muck.
The 24-year-old English musician wrote BREACH during a period of self-imposed isolation in Germany, long before the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s not hard to be alone anymore,” she muses on a track titled “Berlin.”
Quarantine has made me more aware than ever of the necessity of music in my life. And while a lot of music tangentially relates to the emotional impact of isolation, I have yet to find another collection of songs that hit the nail on the head quite as well as Fenne Lily does on BREACH.
At the time this album was released, I was on month 6 of coronavirus quarantine in the U.S. I was a recent university graduate who found myself isolating in my childhood bedroom rather than moving out to a new city and starting my adult life.
And while I’ve been incredibly lucky throughout the pandemic in terms of my health and financial security, it’s hard to shake the feeling that I’m missing out on the life I should be living. Quarantine has made me feel as though I’m stuck in the past, as it has allowed me endless time to ruminate.
Lily rehashes the past over and over on BREACH, mulling over the breakdowns of bad relationships, episodes of anxiety, and a childhood near-death experience. But it doesn’t feel like pointless dwelling — with every observation on her past, I see her productively processing. Her lyrics are cutting and candid, sometimes singed with sarcasm, a window into the genuine emotion behind each track.
In listening to this album, I realized that even though I had been brimming with negative thoughts for the past several months, I had been leaving them to buzz around me and never letting myself actually feel them.
I went through a painful breakup during quarantine, and for the first few months afterward, my main objective was to tamp down my sadness and disappointment. The first time I heard the track “Birthday,” it felt like a punch to the gut. The song traces the course of a relationship and subsequent betrayal, and it reminded me so much of my own situation that I felt like I could have written it myself. It forced all of my unresolved emotions to the surface, and I was forced to confront them.
That song became part of my daily rotation for the next couple of months. In addition to being incredibly cathartic, it helped me realize that the only way to get over the breakup was to let myself properly grieve.
Several months later, I still love listening to this hauntingly beautiful track — but it doesn’t hurt anymore.
In an interview with Bedroom Disco, Lily explained that the album title of BREACH refers both to her having been a breech-birthed baby and to the personal breakthrough that she achieved personally during the creation of her LP:
‘Breach’ can be a word to describe, like, breaking through a wall or a barrier, and I feel like between the beginning and the end of the album, I achieved a lot of personal things. There is a lot of growth implied in the word.
After 12 months in quarantine, it’s hard not to feel like an entire year of life has been lost. But seeing Fenne Lily shine with the fruits of her own isolation on BREACH reminds me that the time spent working things out on your own is not time wasted.
In February 2021, Fenne Lily uploaded a collection of live performances of songs from BREACH performed in a decorated tunnel. After listening, I found myself ordering a pair of overalls and strumming my own guitar, with reinvigorated hope for the future.
BREACH is a salve for periods of rumination, of waiting, of grappling with issues on your own terms. And while it’s an album that suits itself perfectly to the current quarantine period, I know that it will reappear throughout my life, reminding me of the importance of letting yourself reel through the negatives of the past in order to heal.
