Album Review: Blue Raspberry by Katy Kirby

Not just another episode of tenderness Katy Kirby's style of indie-folk has always--meaning since her 2021 debut--felt understated. There, on that album, Kirby's sometimes sad, more often fun, but always, always confident song-writing lent the music a breeziness that excused, maybe even justified a shallow listen. In most ways, that's a compliment: Cool Dry Place is "easy listening", but only in the sense that Kirby's cool, authoritative writing and performance make it such an easy album to listen to.

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Katy Kirby's follow-up to her dazzling debut, Cool Dry Place, is equally captivating in spite of a few less lustrous moments. Blue Raspberry explores Kirby's first queer relationship and in doing so captures the newness of any romance in its tentative first steps through to the messiness of its final throes. Repeated references to cubic zirconias (not to mention lab grown diamonds) and blue raspberries are used as ciphers for the effort to suss out who and what is real when it comes to love.

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There's a saturated market for indie pop albums about LGBTQ+ relationships at the moment. That's obviously something to celebrate - but it presents a new challenge for queer musicians, one that replaces being silenced with being drowned out. Katy Kirby's second album, ‘Blue Raspberry’, rises well enough to that challenge, although it never quite manages to break free of its influences: there are times when you could be listening to any number of similarly accomplished, silken-voiced singer-songwriters plying their craft in the 2020s.

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