Gretel - Squish

Maddy Haenlein’s road to ‘Squish’ has been far from straightforward. Breaking through in 2021 as Gretel Hänlyn with the strikingly eerie ‘Slugeye’, she was marked as one to watch. But with that early acclaim came heavy expectations. Perhaps too much, too soon. Fearing she’d lost her voice before she’d even found it, she stepped back and reset, scrapping an album with Mura Masa along the way. With ‘Squish’, and now performing as just Gretel, she returns with a sharper, more self-assured sound.

“All I want is to be squished by you”, she laments on the opening track. Softly romantic, achingly sad, and a little bit perverse, this is ‘Squish’ in a nutshell: an album of young lust in all its many, messy forms filtered through gothic haze, whether in the unspooling cathartic rush of ‘Maybelline’ or the deliciously venomous ‘Witch Hunt’. Tracks like ‘Darkness Be My Friend’ and ‘Drunk On The Ballroom Floor’ can sometimes feel more like a patchwork of influences than something distinctly Gretel, the former in particular with more than a touch of Lucy Dacus about it. But when her own voice shines, it really shines.

Two of the album’s finest moments, ‘Unbloom’ and ‘Laurali’, come back to back. One, a Hole-esque sludge fest about facing your feelings head on, the other a beautiful tender lullaby for her brother. Though different in style, they reveal the hopeful heart of ‘Squish’; that, amid the chaos, it’s always worth fighting to protect what matters most.