It was in December 2022 that The Staves celebrated the 10th anniversary of their debut album Dead & Born & Grown - a strange and beautiful period in the lives of sisters and band members Jessica, Camilla and Emily Staveley-Taylor, making their fourth album All Now with the same organic vulnerability as that first record: except now everything was different, and they kind of were too.
All Now emerges, bold and bright, from a period of quiet, which followed a period of chaos, for the band. When Good Woman was released in 2021, to positive reviews, it felt like "an echoing silence" to share such a cathartic album with a world shut down.
So The Staves had to retreat, again, and actually wrestle with everything they had been through. The result? An album as rich and honest as all the most profound music by The Staves scattered across albums for the last decade, calcified here into something special. But the most thrilling part of this album, is that the hardest pills to swallow, here, almost have a sweeter taste. Once you've survived the climb to the top, learned from the journey, you may as well enjoy the view.
"When you sing about hesitation and fear, there's a lot of power in not making it sound fearful and being quite steadfast instead," says Camilla. "It feels like an act of taking control." With All Now, there's no letting go.
