Anna Meredith has spent the last few years writing music for other people's projects: film scores, a string quartet record, even a piece for bumper cars. Today she announced Darling, her first proper studio album since 2019's Fibs, due February 12, 2027 on Mercury KX. The opening track, "Dusky," is out now, and it sounds like a composer who has been saving up.
If you missed her first two albums, here is the short version. Meredith is a classically trained composer who wrote "froms" for the 2008 Last Night of the Proms and served as composer in residence with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, then swerved into electronic music on Moshi Moshi. Her debut album Varmints won the 2016 Scottish Album of the Year Award, and Fibs was shortlisted for the 2020 Mercury Prize, according to her Wikipedia entry. Her live band runs on tuba, cello, drums and electric guitar next to her own synths and clarinet, which tells you a lot about the sound: brass band muscle, math rock rhythms, synth pop color.
Since Fibs, the work has been mostly commissioned: 2021's Bumps Per Minute: 18 Studies for Dodgems, scores for the A24 film Tuesday and Netflix's The End We Start From, Nuc with the Ligeti Quartet in 2023, and a score for Wicker, a Sundance fantasy comedy with Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård due in US theaters on October 23. Darling is her first pop-oriented album since Fibs, and it is the record those side projects were orbiting.
What Darling sounds like so far
Meredith's own description is about scale. "The tracks are longer, bolder, wilder and simpler than anything that appears on my previous albums," she said in the announcement, calling the record "a technicolour version of what my music can be." She framed it as music made "to summon motion, tension and release" at a time when the world "feels overwhelming."
"Dusky" backs that up. She describes it as "4 tracks in one," built from the things she loves writing: "polyrhythms, parpy brass, metric modulations, waily synths." The whole piece was engineered to arrive at a heavy, chugging metal riff for her guitarist Jack Ross, and she says it "makes me whoop with the joy and silliness of it every time." That mix of rigor and goofiness has always been the point of her music, and it is what separates her from the more polite end of the modern classical shelf.
Formats, prices and the tracklist
Meredith's official site lists Darling on limited edition pink double 12-inch vinyl, CD, download and streaming. The Mercury KX store has the "Flumps Pink" 2LP with a signed postcard at £35.99 and the CD with a signed art card at £11.99. The vinyl spreads the 11 tracks over three sides and puts an etching on side D, so if you want the pressing, that is the edition to grab before it goes.
The tracklist: "Dusky," "Mode Mouse," "Last Words," "Cry Baby," "Lye," "Underling," "Mink," "Rites," "Aphid," "3019" and "Peach."
A pink double LP with an etched fourth side is also an easy add to our list of gifts for vinyl collectors, even if it lands after the holidays. And if her blend of composed and electronic music is your thing, our roundup of the best books about electronic music covers the history she keeps bending.
Plenty of composers cross over and soften the edges on the way. Meredith keeps doing the opposite, and Darling sounds like the loudest version of that yet.
