When Keeley Forsyth sings, you are acutely aware of the body emitting her voice. Not in what he looks like, necessarily—not his age or shape, gender or skin color—but his raw physicality, his foundation of bone and nerve. She sings with her whole chest: diaphragm tightening, air filling lungs, muscles twisting up the length of her neck, releasing a presence dripping with the blood of the flesh that produced it. Some singers try to make their art sound effortless. Forsyth emphasizes physical exertion.
Maybe that sound was born out of desperation. In 2017, Forsyth, who has been acting professionally since she was a teenager—primarily on British television, though she also has recent credits in Guardians of the Galaxy and Poor— suffered a mental and physical breakdown that left her tongue paralyzed for a month. The desperation of this experience was palpable in its 2020 debut, Debrisan album of haunted minimalist folk released at the age of 40. Extremes, which followed in 2022, was more conventionally beautiful. But up The Hollowher third album, she puts her gale-force vibrato in the service of her most intense music.
“I've always liked to make people a little uncomfortable with the sounds and music I make,” Forsyth once told The Quietus. here, he sometimes feels like he wants to be terrified. The album begins with imposing restraint. Over slow instrumental tones, her voice mournful and controlled, she outlines an agonizing search for meaning, with a uniquely haunting image of natural desolation, “Veins like dry stalks/That can never bear water.” The title track, which follows, begins with functional grace, but her voice—digitally layered, trembling intensely—takes on the sound of a throaty sob, her words at first almost unintelligible. A dirgel-like mantra (“There's no help here / Not for me”) gives way to a terrifying scream – “Shook my life/Out of my mouth” – delivered with throat-splitting force.
Forsyth and her producer, Ross Downes, continue to channel the same influences as her previous music, most notably Scott Walker Grow old and Meredith Monk, along with the spiritual yearning of Arvo Pärt and the cerebral goth of This Mortal Coil. Even when it raises the hairs on the back of your neck, it evokes a terrible, sinister beauty. On “Eva,” she offers a tender tribute to her grandmother, who raised her: “Nothing can/break us apart/Let the body lie/And die.” (On The Hollow, even songs in a major key are about death.) On “Turning,” they lift her up, chanting and screaming over the swelling waters of Colin Stetson's arching sax. is a romantic landscape painting rendered with sound.
