Sophie May - Deep Sea Creatures

Sometimes, a lyric will bite the bullet in a way that you can’t help but admire for ‘going there’. Sometimes, as on the gently-cooed ‘Tiny Dictator’, the ‘there’ that they’ve gone to is a place so eye-poppingly, what-did-you-just-say bananas that it’s a toss up between giving the author a standing ovation and an intervention. A dissection of chaotic intrusive thoughts, if there was any further proof that Sophie May was cut from a different cloth than most of her singer-songwriter peers it’s in this third EP offering: “Can’t have sex without thinking of my own mother’s face / Can’t get drunk, what if I black out and fuck everyone? / Oh god, what if I’m a paedophile?!” Just another TikTok bedroom star, May most certainly is not. Crucially, however, these moments that push a knowing kind of (over)honesty are wrapped around a truly classic ear for melody. ‘Marianne’ nods to the Faithfull of its title, while the slight country lilt of both that and ‘If I’d Never Been Born’ find closer peers in the likes of Weyes Blood and Angel Olsen than her youthful UK compatriots. Lead single ‘Brian Cox’ features an unlikely cameo from its scientific namesake, while the heartbreaking simplicity of closer ‘Just Want You’ is, to these ears, objectively perfect. On ‘Deep Sea Creatures’, Sophie May is doing everything differently and everything right.