Katie Gavin - What A Relief

Signed to Phoebe Bridgers’ Saddest Factory Records, it seemed inevitable that MUNA vocalist Katie Gavin would one day flex her singer-songwriting muscles beyond the confines of the three-piece pop outfit. Across their 11-year existence, whispers of Americana and country teased an itch to sway from gargantuan power-pop bops towards cardigan-and-a-cuppa knee-tappers, and on debut solo record ‘What A Relief’, dusty rays of fiery dawn reveal that at Katie’s core lies a knack for Alanis Morissette-adjacent, acoustic soft-pop. Here, she explores the human condition through the lens of domesticity: the mundanity of long-term romance; the slow death of codependence; reckless complacency; the loss of identity when lovers leave, and the inevitability of mimicking familial romantic failures. To an imaginary daughter, she admits they’re destined to share more in common than they’d like (‘The Baton’), yet Katie also makes efforts to undo generational trauma before the roots become too stubborn (‘Inconsolable’). Meanwhile, the off-piste delirium of ‘Sanitised’, the record’s most animated cut, paints the cutting reality of malleability - and gender pressures - in love. Here, her pen is as deft as ever, pointing to neuroses yet-mined by even the most introspective romantic. Among the cobwebbed corners of a home riddled with swept-under-the-rug tension, Gavin is fairly content with those little devastations, the disappointments and obsessions that come part-and-parcel with love and lineage, because in the aching tedium often lies familiarity, meaning and, ultimately, home - as aptly described on standout Mitski collab ‘As Good As It Gets’. ‘What A Relief’ is subtle in sound but wildly rapturous in its admissions, an intricately crafted depiction of comfortable heartache. And in her solo debut, Gavin moves towards the hall of fame status of the poetic songwriters that made her.