Eleri Ward Steps Into Her Own With Internal Rituals

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Eleri Ward has already established herself as a one-woman Stephen Sondheim interpreter. Her acoustic folk albums A Perfect Little Death and Keep a Tender Distance reinterpreted the master's songs in horrorscopic personal language, catching The New York Times' and Forbes' attention and landing her on tour with Josh Groban. But on her first album of originals, Internal Rituals, released Sept. 26, Ward shines the light on herself. What comes across is an album that is grand and close, the voice of a showy voice re-writing its own script.

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On 12 tracks, Ward bounds across the stripped-down folk that marked her Sondheim arrangements and into a more lush, more adventurous sound. Ethereal electronics swirl around intricately layered vocals, and glimpses of future-jazz, indie-pop, and heavenly ambience drift through the arrangements. At their center is her voice, a limber soprano that glides between registers, throbbing with feeling on a par with a string instrument. Though her covers albums demonstrated her facility as an interpreter, Internal Rituals reveals her to be a writer of vision and tough vulnerability.

The melodies themselves are drawn from the intensely personal, memories, astrological charts, emotional cycles, and they never sound narcissistic. Instead, they happen as intimate confidences, born of the shared heartbeat of love, fear, loss, and rebirth. There You Go implies karma is a blessing, with the hindsight recognition of gratitude. Float contains the nightmarish exhilaration of freedom. Venusian Light radiates self-love. Someone, Something New travels even further, mapping the complicated terrain of Ward's relationship with her biological father and the way trauma can repeat itself through generations.

Her own solo single, Run, is a turnaround. Propulsive synths and piano drive her delivery as she performs the thrum of throwing off outdated shackles. You know listening that Ward isn't so much announcing a new beginning so much as fashioning one. That feeling of momentum, of arrival, permeates the album as an entirety.

The title of the album, Internal Rituals, is fitting. The songs are reckonings and release rituals, almost personal healing rituals done on behalf of the listener. Ward has spoken about learning to make beats and produce D.I.Y. herself, taking control of her sound for the first time as a songwriter. You can hear the independence on the album. It isn't over-produced or aloof, it pulsates with the urgency of someone finding voice in the moment.

Ward's journey to this location has been steeped in performance for a long time. A five-year-old multi-instrumentalist, she went through the Chicago Academy for the Arts and Boston Conservatory before finding her career as an accomplished stage actor and recording artist. She played off-Broadway in Only Gold, acted in the American Repertory Theater's Gatsby, and most recently took center stage at the Miu Miu Tales & Tellers fashion show. But Internal Rituals is not so much about displaying range as it is about taking up space. It is not the voice of an interpreter or a purveyor of other people's words—it is the voice of an artist finding herself in full.

There are times on the record that evoke the cinematic splendor of Björk or the unearthly fragility of Imogen Heap, but Ward is not imitating. She is building a sound world where dramatics and closeness exist together, where electronic beats can walk hand in hand with folk sympathies, and where the near becomes large enough to become communal.

Internal Rituals is not a debut album. It's an entry into adulthood. Through these songs, Ward moves beyond interpreter to designer of her own musical world, asserting that the desire which she had hitherto expressed through Sondheim was her own as well. And now, at last, she can express it in words.