Review: Lilly Hiatt’s ‘Lately’ Is the Artist’s Most Daring, Experimental Album to Date

It’s hardly surprising that, for a songwriter whose work often draws on her most private, darkest feelings, the isolation that Lilly Hiatt experienced during the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in as much creative inspiration as it did emotional distress. “I have always felt lonely, but never gone to the depths of solitude that I had in 2020,” Hiatt has said about the process of recording her fifth album, Lately. And it shows in the fragility of her lyrics and voice.

The album’s simple, one-word song titles and ramshackle arrangements suggest a blunted capacity for more elaborate creativity. Even Hiatt’s voice sounds different here, like it’s directed inward, coming from the roof of her mouth rather than her chest. Conversely, Hiatt’s last album, Walking Proof, which was released just as the pandemic took hold early last year and captured the singer in a more confident mood, felt like a culmination of her ongoing transition from rootsy country-folk to a more expansive rock-oriented sound.

As Lately opens, it seems as though Hiatt is retreating from that trajectory. The opening track, “Simple,” which revisits a happy childhood memory, is the most straightforward country song that she’s released in recent memory. The next track, “Been,” maintains a stripped down, acoustic-centric approach, with only Mike LoPinto’s strangely dissonant guitar accents hinting at the less genre-hewn style of Walking Proof and 2017’s Trinity Lane.

Hiatt’s high, keening voice sounds like an echo from the mountain music of centuries past, and she can write a perfect honky-tonk shitkicker like “Face” and a bitter kiss-off like “The Last Tear.” But despite these moments of ostensible genre conventionality, Lately reveals itself to be Hiatt’s most daring and experimental work to date. The songs’ relative lack of polish knocks down what few layers of pretense may have previously existed between the listener and the characteristically unvarnished inner thoughts that compose most of her lyrics.

The cozy, ambling “Stop” explores unrequited romantic obsession in a manner that, not unlike Taylor Swift’s “You Belong with Me,” reads a bit creepy on the page. But Hiatt’s performance is alternately sweet, endearing, and wounded. “Ride,” on the other hand, finds Hiatt in relationship nirvana, with the song’s hushed, atmospheric desert-country sound offering a window into the most intimate emotions she shares with her flame.

Other than, perhaps, “Face” and the title track, a cheery pop song laced with Born in the U.S.A.-style synths, the album’s best material is its weirdest. “Peach” and “Gem” reprise the distorted guitars of Trinity Lane, but they cut against formula with a laidback rhythmic approach that’s practically a rebuke to the machismo that surrounds arena rock.

The latter track, despite featuring the heaviest guitars of any Hiatt track to date, omits drums altogether. It’s a fascinating choice—especially considering that Hiatt’s drummer, Kate Haldrup, co-produced Lately—that enables the artist to acutely express feelings of anger and bitterness over failed relationships without indulging in all sorts of vocal sturm und drang. “I don’t wanna sing this song,” she even claims at the beginning of “Gem.” But with no other outlet available, she may have had no choice.