Catherine Elms’, ‘Bring In the Wild’, is the kind of album that unravels you from the inside out. This isn’t just a record; it’s a brooding, baroque spiral down into the psychic underworld, where darkness isn’t the enemy- it’s the mirror.
Following the gothic grandeur of lead singles ‘Medusa’ and ‘Brutal Heart’, Elms’ second full-length LP arrives not with fanfare, but with ferocity. It’s a lush, unflinching excavation of the shadow-self, one that reaches for Carl Jung’s deepest theories and somehow makes them sing.
From the opening notes, Elms casts her familiar spell: cinematic piano lines, choral swells, and the kind of aching vulnerability that feels less like performance and more like testimony. But what sets ‘Bring In the Wild’ apart isn’t just its atmosphere- it’s the way she walks the tightrope never flinching as she drags each emotional thorn into the light.
The album’s true power lies in its quieter confrontations. On songs like ‘I’m Used To That By Now’ or ‘Things To Keep Hidden’, Elms sounds less like a performer and more like a guide- someone who’s walked the fire and come back with embers in her voice. There’s rage here, and longing, and grief. But more than anything, there’s a defiant kind of grace.
Elms’ musical vocabulary draws clear lines to the theatrical world of Kate Bush and the emotional gravity of Fiona Apple, but there’s a distinctly Welsh wildness to her approach- like Florence Welch raised in fog and thistle. Her arrangements are dense without feeling cluttered, often punctuated by sweeping strings, growling low-end, and haunting vocal harmonies that coil around each lyric like vines.
What truly elevates ‘Bring In the Wild’, though, is its sense of purpose. This is not an album that wallows in sadness- it studies it, respects it, and reclaims it. Elms doesn’t romanticise her pain, but she refuses to abandon it either. Instead, she allows each jagged feeling- jealousy, lust, rage- to become a teacher. It’s a thematic move that could easily lean into melodrama, but Elms handles it with intelligence and restraint, grounding the mysticism in emotional truth.
On ‘Bring In the Wild’, Catherine Elms is building a sanctuary for the misunderstood parts of ourselves. The result is one of the most emotionally courageous alt-rock records of the year.
This is art as exorcism. Beauty born of fracture. And a powerful reminder that our wildest selves might be the most sacred of all.