Album Review: See You at the Maypole by Half Waif

I felt it growing in me, now everything is gone Perhaps it's inevitable to lead off a review of See You At The Maypole with a reference to the most striking component of its backstory - the traumatic miscarriage Half Waif's Nandi Rose went through in 2021. It's the type of event that is horrifyingly visceral, even from my perspective as a childless man - the experience of expecting a newborn and then having your blooming hopes ripped away. It's undoubtedly a deeply personal tragedy, and one I feel uneasy lingering upon, but the event also deeply informs this record - a set of songs crafted in the aftermath, contemplating the unthinkable, charting an unmapped path ahead.

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If Half Waif's aim was to reflect her surroundings while writing 'See You At The Maypole' in its final form, then she can consider it a task well done. The seventeen track album is so relentless in its sadness, so emotionally fraught that - owing in part to Nandi Rose's crystalline, piercing vocal - it's as if the record could shatter at any moment. She makes use of varied sonic textures: the demo-style drum track of 'Big Dipper'; the minimalism of 'Sunset Hunting'; the almost wrong-speed hyperpop beat of 'Ephemeral Being'; and perhaps most effectively the synth pattern in 'I-90', which echoes the bright lights shining through during a night time drive.

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