The hard truth is, no matter how many albums we review for Paste each year, there are always countless releases that end up overlooked. That\u2019s why, from now until the end of December, we\u2019re bringing back our No Album Left Behind series and singing the praises of our favorite underrated records of 2025.<\/p>\n
The soft, subliminal world of Maria Somerville\u2019s Luster is one of my favorite places music has taken me this year. Her finely crafted pop-psychedelia conjures a sound that sits somewhere between shoegaze and ambience, where each song is a three-dimensional landscape touched by post-punk, slowcore, and astral-projected hypnagogia. Here, the Irish singer-songwriter\u2014and frequent host of NTS\u2019s Early Bird Show\u2014joins the ranks of experimental pop aficionadas like Astrid Sonne and ML Buch. While trying to describe the sonic quality of Luster, I keep favoring symbolism over specificity. To do the sound justice, thinking about in terms of rippling lakes and grassy plains feels more faithful than adhering to musical technicalities. Each song feels like an exploration in setting rather than technique, with motifs that circle back to the sky and its pathways. Luster\u2019s environment is distinct, holistic, fabled.<\/p>\n
And sometimes, these environments manifest more literally: cooing songbirds and crashing waves ease into the instrumental opener, \u201cR\u00e9alt.\u201d As Somerville makes way for the proceeding \u201cProjections,\u201d she widens her scope, sifting through layers of wispy vocals that keep the language at an arm\u2019s length. You can just make out the \u201call my love for you is not hanging onto something else\u201d line, but only when the song heaves with her breath, slowly undulating. A good chunk of Luster consists of wandering ballads like \u201cProjections,\u201d with Somerville\u2019s voice at the forefront\u2014which commands the form of each song somewhat listlessly. At times, she\u2019s all but indiscernible, like in \u201cHalo,\u201d which doesn\u2019t adhere to any strict meter, finding its footing instead through a reverberating guitar and murmured melody. \u201cCorrib\u201d falls into this camp as well, when Somerville sings so close to the microphone you can hear her lips touch between vowels. Her intimacy is assigned a physical landmark: \u201cThrough the fields looking at you \/ All the memories \/ Now\u2019ve come true around us.\u201d <\/p>\n
When Somerville needs a rhythmic anchor, she reaches for deep, bassy percussion and sedated drumwork. \u201cGarden\u201d utilizes her knack for a hazy sheen of dream pop, with a beat that grooves languidly beneath a shimmering guitar. She opens the song in medias res, singing, \u201cInto the passage of time,\u201d and encapsulating Luster\u2019s relationship with temporality. The lyrics read like a fragmentary poetic experiment; Somerville begins phrases she never completes, writing in flashes of imagery and memory: \u201cI\u2019d give you what I \/ In time I\u2019d go around \/ Swimming through the \/ And out of the cave.\u201d In between spurts of abstraction are moments of concise feeling\u2014like in \u201cViolet,\u201d the record\u2019s thematic center, the chorus of which I\u2019ve found myself recalling like a sacred maxim, feeling every bit affirmed each time I hum along to \u201cI belong to life and love.\u201d Somerville\u2019s music is often lyrically sparse, giving the words she chooses even greater resonance. \u201cViolet\u201d is her love letter to transformation, for all of the upheaval that comes with it. The beat softly ticks like a polite clock, warning that \u201cthe sea of change\u201d will soon come crashing in.<\/p>\n
For all its environmental imagery, the world of Luster can also be intangible. \u201cOctober Moon\u201d sees Somerville calling to a friend that\u2019s left the earth entirely. \u201cIn heaven I look away,\u201d she sings. \u201cTo know you more and more while you are sleeping.\u201d The song\u2019s echoes and dreamscapes ache with tired longing and move with the assertion that someday \u201cI\u2019ll meet you there.\u201d Somerville feels stuck in a tug of war between hindsight and hopefulness, returning time and again to transience when her songs can\u2019t quite reach the present. If I could bottle up Luster into one line, it would be \u201cwaves of time, watching it roll away.\u201d Like the best ideas from Cocteau Twins, Grouper, and Julianna Barwick, Somerville\u2019s second record doesn\u2019t move in a straight line but meanders and breathes, in expanse and in blurs. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The hard truth is, no matter how many albums we review for Paste each year, there are always…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":371997,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":{"0":"post-371996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=371996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/371996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/371997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=371996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=371996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=371996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}