Listening to sittingbugs feels akin to those groggy yet comfortable mid-morning starts, the sun peeking through the curtain crack. You’re hopeful for the day ahead.
Belfast-based artist Lucy Gaffney has always charmed with her honest lyrics and laidback, low-fi melodies, and her latest EP released this August further showcases Gaffney’s hypnotic songwriting talents. Softly introspective, sittingbugs invites the listener into an idyllic soundscape of calming tempo and smooth percussion.
Calling to mind the vocals of Slow Pulp’s Emily Massey, ‘lovestruck’, the opening track, features Gaffney weaving messages of love and longing with angelic song in the refrain “I am without”. With themes of anticipation and the instability of distance, evident in the lines “holding out to see you/lovestruck here without you all the same”, Gaffney’s spacey instrumental effectsestablish this track as a touching introduction to a beautifully self-contained record.
Gaffney’s reverberating vocals and soft humming on the EP’s titular track create a wonderful echo effect melding with a gentle accompanying guitar riff, calling to mind loved ones who “know me better than I know myself”. The third track ‘only’ sees Gaffney use sweet harmonies to present a tender love song, full of yearning and vulnerable lyricism with a slow fade-out in dreamy indie fashion.
Closing sittingbugs with the fuzzy-vocaled ‘lines that I could cross’, Gaffney tells of love’s journey; the excitement of the future and the challenges, and often melancholy, it can bring: “There’s something in the distance breathing love into our hearts […] seeing what lies ahead I could cry”. A strong ending to this EP, Gaffney leaves the listener with that universal experience of facing the scary unknown with the reposeful support of loved ones.
If Lucy Gaffney sings with a soft smile, I wear one in return.
