Hollie Smith
Coming In From The Dark
Album · R&B/Soul · 2021
One of Aotearoa’s mightiest modern soul singers, Hollie Smith sets her booming yet finely calibrated voice against ambitious arrangements on her fourth album. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra backs Smith on three songs, broadening the scope as she pours out her emotions. The other tracks are layered and active in their own right (hear the dramatic bursts of piano and cymbal during the climactic power ballad “Damage Done”). On “The One to Go”, her voice rises and whispers in step with the song’s unflinching breakup narrative, while Rwandan Kiwi rapper RAIZA BIZA fully seizes the other half of the lived-in heartbreak saga, “What About”. Elsewhere commanding smoky, snaking vocal turns, Smith conveys life’s inevitable pain and setbacks before signalling the healing potential of what comes next.
Coming In From The Dark
Hollie Smith
One of Aotearoa’s mightiest modern soul singers, Hollie Smith sets her booming yet finely calibrated voice against ambitious arrangements on her fourth album. The New Zealand Symphony Orchestra backs Smith on three songs, broadening the scope as she pours out her emotions. The other tracks are layered and active in their own right (hear the dramatic bursts of piano and cymbal during the climactic power ballad “Damage Done”). On “The One to Go”, her voice rises and whispers in step with the song’s unflinching breakup narrative, while Rwandan Kiwi rapper RAIZA BIZA fully seizes the other half of the lived-in heartbreak saga, “What About”. Elsewhere commanding smoky, snaking vocal turns, Smith conveys life’s inevitable pain and setbacks before signalling the healing potential of what comes next.
