Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, the English musician constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present.
Oftentimes when Rozi Plain prepares to perform live, her body shuts down. “It’s just sort of this intense fatigue and I can barely keep my eyes open,” the English singer-songwriter has explained. Under a veil of nerves, she succumbs to rituals she doesn’t quite understand, like frantically brushing her teeth or doing vocal exercises she doesn’t really believe in. It’s as if when Plain tries to picture what will go down onstage, her brain grows weary, overwhelmed by possibilities. Her fifth studio album, Prize, might serve as an antidote. Working with minimalist guitar, gentle vocals, and an understated rhythm section, Plain constructs a careful lesson about the awe of being present in the moment. Whereas 2019’s What a Boost was a centering breath, Prize reframes her calming presence as a state of mind to take with you after the music stops.
As a bassist in the UK folk group This Is the Kit, Plain understands the importance of subtle momentum, the kind that lends airy music a fiery passion. She replicates that approach on Prize with the help of her go-to crew—drummer Jamie Whitby-Coles, bassist Amaury Ranger, guitarist James Howard, and pianist Gerard Black—turning a quiet combination of instruments on “Help” into a breezy, groove-forward single. Plain’s songs flow like streams of consciousness, all ambiance and fade-ins, and her stacked vocal harmonies draw out emotion from that tranquility. On “Complicated” and “Conversation,” she sands down the edges of the electric bass and guitar, creating the illusion that they’re being played inches away from your ears. A compelling cast of guest performers, including saxophonists Alabaster dePlume and Cole Pulice, the Comet Is Coming’s Danalogue on synths, Trash Kit’s Rachel Horwood on banjo, and harpist Serafina Steer, among others, contribute to the music’s dreamlike quality.
Across the album’s 40 minutes, an image of Plain begins to develop: She doesn’t believe in the past as a compass or the future as a roadmap. She has no tinted lens through which to reimagine the world, nor a nostalgic fixation on old memories. Instead Plain writes about her surroundings and the way they make her feel as if she’s in the present. She brushes off the past as merely what “existed before you” and accepts the future with equanimity, offering, “What is it if it’s not?” Time is out of her hands and she knows that denying such is willful ignorance. As she puts it in “Prove Your Good,” “I like to say/It had to be this way.”
Plain’s apparent effortlessness as she grapples with indecision and recenters herself in the now could prompt envy—that is, if it weren’t for how swiftly the music ushers you into that same state of mind. She refashions small details into grounding opportunities: a gorgeous swell of strings, courtesy of violinist Emma Smith, that triples in size during “Sore,” like the sudden explosion of purples and pinks during a sunset; the jaunty vocal harmonies shared between Plain and This Is the Kit bandmate Kate Stables in “Agreeing for Two,” replicating the warm pain of cheek muscles that have laughed too hard; an extended saxophone outro by dePlume in “Spot Thirteen” that mimics the feeling of watching the final wisp of smoke rise from a dwindling fire. Plain’s solo music has always rooted itself in a sense of calm, but with Prize, she also offers up the understated beauty of observation.
By the album’s closer, “Blink,” Plain distills that mindfulness into a display of camaraderie. “Blink if you love me, everyone everywhere,” she sings cooly. “With elastic energy, circular it has to be.” And with that, the album’s final note segues back into the opening track, inviting you to play it on loop and to linger a little longer in its demonstration of active presence—not quite as an ode to infinity, but as a key for those shackled to anxiety about what tomorrow, next week, next year might bring.
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