On Her New Single “Abigail,” Susie McCollum writes to her younger self and turns restraint into refuge.
Susie McCollum has released “Abigail,” a hush-toned dispatch that extends the promise of her 2024 debut EP, Tempt My Fate. The American indie artist frames a chill meditation in the crosswinds of indie pop and neo-soul: supple grooves, gauzy ambience, and a voice that smolders without theatrics. McCollum’s poetic candor carries the narrative—an address to a young self split between expectation and freedom—while the arrangement keeps its distance, letting air and echo act as co-authors. You hear the lineage: Joni Mitchell’s diarist clarity shadowed by Amy Winehouse’s dusky grain, reinterpreted with modern restraint. “Abigail” feels less like a confession than a permission slip, a gentle summons to belong to oneself before the world drafts its agreements.
The song’s dreamy hush works medicinally; it doesn’t push catharsis, it coaxes it. McCollum sings to the “wandering girl” with an intimacy that never curdles into nostalgia, inviting the inner child to sit at the table and choose what’s next hand in hand. The tempo drifts at a pace, giving listeners room to breathe, to lay down armor, to remember the reasons that started them moving. Texturally, the track wears a soft-focus glow—silhouettes instead of outlines—so that lyric turns arrive like revelations rather than boldface italics. By the last refrain, “Abigail” has become a sanctuary for evenings and unhurried walks: a map sketched in pencil, a promise to step forward without abandoning who first dreamed. It’s honest, versatile, and beautifully lived-in—like the future learning to speak.
Enjoyed the read? Consider showing your support by leaving a tip for the writer
TRENDING NOW
Every year has one song that feels like a diary left open on the kitchen table; for Alexa Kate, “Forever” is that unguarded page. Over mid-tempo, indie-folk-kissed acoustic pop, she dissects time…
Midnight is that strange hour when the sky feels half-closed, and Hayden Calnin’s Middle Night sounds like the diary you write there. Recorded in his coastal studio, this seven-song cycle of adult contemporary, alt-pop and indie folk lingers in the quiet…
Every copyright lawyer’s worst nightmare might sound a lot like Nada UV’s Ideas Won’t Behave—three tracks of neo-soul and indie R&B that treat intellectual property as a cosmic joke rather than…
They say the soul weighs twenty-one grams; Giuseppe Cucé answers by asking how much memory, desire, and regret weigh when they start singing. 21 Grammi is his response—a nine-song indie-pop cycle that treats that old myth not as a scientific claim…
Every quarter-life crisis deserves its own hymn, and Drew Schueler’s “I Thought By Now” arrives like a confession whispered over blue light and unpaid dreams. The title track from his EP Vulnerable For Once turns the myth of linear success…
It’s a common knowledge that every lost summer has a soundtrack, and Brando’s “When You Stay” volunteers itself as the quiet anthem for the moments you replay in your head long…
Every revolution needs a bar jukebox, a desert highway, and a girl who refuses to shut up. ILUKA’s the wild, the innocent, & the raging album arrives as exactly that: a neon-lit road movie of an album where witchy cowgirls, runaway girls and manic pixie…
They say winter teaches the pulse to whisper; in SIESKI’s “Close,” that whisper becomes a hearth, glowing steady as snowfall along a quiet Canadian street. Catchy piano keys chime like frost-bright porch lights, while a cello moves beneath them…
A campfire flickers on the prairie while the city votes to forget—rrunnerrss, the eponymous debut by the Austin-born band rrunnerrss led by award-winning songwriter and composer Michael Zapruder, arrives as both shelter and flare…
A dusk-coloured confession drifts out of Denmark and echoes through Lisbon’s old streets; “Før Du Går” finds CECILIE turning a goodbye into a slow-burning spiritual. Rooted in acoustic pop and alt-folk, the song opens bare: soft, cyclical guitar figures cradle her soulful…