Album Review: Goodbye Small Head by Ezra Furman

There’s an urgency coursing through this startling album’s veins that confirms its creator to be one of the most exciting songwriters around It’s been three years since Ezra Furman released the concluding half of her trilogy of albums – beginning with the remarkable Transangelic Exodus, continuing with the short, scrappy Twelve Nudes and ending with All Of Us Flames, an album that was probably the best of Furman’s career to date. Goodbye Small Head feels like both a conclusion of that time and a necessary step forward. There’s an urgency coursing through the album’s veins, inspired no doubt by Furman falling ill in April 2023 – a period which included a hospitalisation and several months resting in bed.

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Ezra Furman's latest album, Goodbye Small Head, is intrinsically brave. It's full of the optimistic guiding light that is hope, especially as it's plagued by dark subject matter. In a press statement, Furman candidly explained that these twelve songs delineate a loss of control through means conventional and not: weakness, heartbreak, mysticism, drugs, and living in society with your eyes wide open.

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It's appalling, but perhaps grimly apt, that Ezra Furman's latest studio album lands now: at a time when, in both the USA and the UK, recent legal action has made life as a trans person even less liveable. But, if anything, this bleak context only serves to heighten the significance of 'Goodbye Small Head' - a record of unflinching honesty and, in terms of her discography to date, unparalleled vulnerability. Having long been one to delight in reinvention, this tenth outing sees Ezra build on her musical bread and butter - namely, rambunctious rock'n'roll dynamics and vivid folk storytelling - with seamlessly incorporated electronic elements, creating a textured tapestry of overwhelm that's as desperate as it is defiant.

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