The Staves - All Now (2024) [Hi-Res]

The Staves' new album All Now, produced by John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), is the first recording without the duo’s sister, Emily Staveley-Taylor, who wasn’t present for touring on the last run, stepping back from the road with the birth of her first baby (and has recently had a second child too).

All Now emerges, bold and bright, from a period of chaos, followed by a period of enforced quiet, for the band. The Staves’ released their third album Good Woman in February 2021, an album of love and loss, written during a disconcerting period of turmoil and pain. “There was a delayed reaction to trauma and these big changes out of your control,” says Jess of the period that came after Good Woman, as the band – like the rest of us – were forced to sit with their thoughts, but also still processing the death of their mother and other seismic changes: Emily taking a backseat on this album (while still contributing vocals on a handful of tracks) to focus on motherhood, while Camilla reckoned with her own mental and physical health issues – chronic pain and a series of operations due to Endometriosis began to take an increasing toll.

Struggling after two years of deep solitude and pain following the release of Good Woman, The Staves did what they know how to do best and got back to writing. The idea was to go against most of what they’d been doing for the last few years by going back to basics and focusing almost solely on each other and their guitars as a starting point.

It began with Jess, navigating this new landscape by harnessing her creativity on her own at first in the studio in Hackney at the end of 2022, slowly luring Camilla back to the next chapter of The Staves, before reaching out to super-producer John Congleton (Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen), who the band had worked with on Good Woman.

The result? An album as rich and honest as all the most profound music by The Staves scattered across albums for the last decade, calcified here into something special.