Album Review: Zoe Konez – Everything’s Fine

I’ve mainly been aware of Zoe Konez through her work as one half of standout indie/pop/rock malangists extraordinaire CATBEAR.

Alongside that band’s excellent output, Brighton-based Konez has also built up a substantial oeuvre as a solo artist, and Everything’s Fine is certain to be a highlight of her career to date. That its musical clarity came from a place of personal uncertainty is a tribute to her songwriting skills, as well as her ability to put hard-to-conceptualise emotional concepts on paper and then bring them to life in such an intimate and vibrant fashion.

Much of the album’s twelve songs are formed of lead vocals, acoustic guitar, and layered backing vocals, yet within that minimalist setting, the tracks are invariably emotionally maximalist. There’s no bombast or excess on the LP, which Konez produced herself, with mixing and mastering courtesy of Oz Craggs at Hidden Track Studios. It means that, for all that the building blocks come from such a frugal range, it has a sensitivity and depth that are sweeping and subtle, always firm and full of form.

And maybe that is why there is that calmness and certainty within the song’s stories of life moments that aren’t failures in any way, but more signals that Konez is still searching for contentment within a life that has been marked by traditional makers of success. The story has still left her wanting something more, that nebulous sensation that this is not all that there is.

I’m not averse to making musical comparisons for the album, and if you’re a fan of, say, Still Corners and ViVii, you’ll love every second of Everything’s Fine. What’s more important is how the album makes me feel: a bit vulnerable, a bit happy, and a bit sad, all the while reminding me of my inner strengths, the ones that got me where I am.

I feel better in myself after listening to Everything’s Fine – that ‘everything’s going to be OK’ quietness I get from hearing A Distant Shore by Tracey Thorn, Aventine by Agnes Obel, or Ten Love Songs by Susanne Sundfør.

By that, I mean that it’s a collection of songs that shift your own emotional dial as much as it is the work of a stranger; you can hear yourself in the lyrics, internal monologues that echo your own, helping to place them within a framework that lets you know that things can change. Music can do that in the short term, but the mindfulness of Everything’s Fine can be a guide of sorts, should you let it.

“Everything’s Fine came from realising that the life I’d built wasn’t actually the one I wanted,” she says of the album. “It became a way of working through that confusion, and slowly figuring out how to build something that felt more truthful.”

The album is set for release on the 12th of June and can be picked up in vinyl and CD formats ahead of then on Bandcamp. The CD edition includes two bonus tracks that are not available anywhere else.

Konez holds a listening party for the album on that platform on the 9th of June. For details of that and pre-save options for Everything’s Fine, head to her Instagram and Facebook feeds.