Hannah Frances has always written like someone trying to slow her own pulse. On last year’s Keeper of the Shepherd, she sifted through the shock of her father’s death, turning grief into a kind of nervous devotion. Her follow-up, Nested in Tangles, begins in the same uneasy body. The opening guitar line shuffles across the floor like an exhausted tap dancer, every footfall landing heavier than it should. Wordless “oohs” hover above it—almost soothing, but slightly dissonant, like a hymn cracked at the edges. Then the floor gives way: drums tumble, horns collide, a saxophone screams out of time. When Frances’ voice finally enters, it rushes forward in a blur, as if the tape machine has lost control. “I believe I can learn to trust again,” she gasps, but the sound swallows her whole. This is what panic sounds like when rendered as art.
“Keeper was about my daddy issues,” Frances joked recently. “This one’s about my mommy issues.” She’s only half kidding. Nested in Tangles is filled with the fallout of a mother’s quiet absences—years collapsing into loss, words flung like knives, the ache of love withheld. Yet the record’s real power lies in what comes after that hurt. Frances sings through the rubble of family to reach something sturdier: “fault lines that were never my fault,” she declares, before her voice rises toward transcendence—“I’ve built around the harm.”
Frances is, in every sense, a builder. Early in her career, her songwriting echoed the intimacy of early Joni Mitchell, but Nested in Tangles aligns more with Hejira’s labyrinthine beauty or Laura Nyro’s untamed grandeur. A self-professed prog-rock obsessive who insisted Gentle Giant be name-dropped in her press release, she plays open-tuned acoustic guitar like an architect sketching blueprints—layer upon layer of sound rising around her.
The album often feels enormous, as if powered by an orchestra, though it’s mostly just Frances, producer Kevin Copeland, and a handful of collaborators including Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen. Together, they approach each song with restless curiosity: How can we make this stranger, fuller, more alive? “A Body, A Map,” a two-minute instrumental bridge, spins from a single electric drone into a magnetic swirl of rhythm and melody—a math-rock daydream hidden in plain sight. Nothing on Nested in Tangles is filler; even its interludes breathe.
Still, all the musical brilliance would mean less if not for the personal clarity shining through. Nested in Tangles is less about pain than persistence. “Life’s Work,” the album’s most immediate song, turns the act of trusting into an Olympic feat: “Learning to trust in spite of it is life’s work,” Frances howls, her voice cracking open on the final word. On “Steady in the Hand,” she faces love’s impermanence with grace: “It takes living and losing to know what matters,” she sings, her tone softening at the edge of forgiveness. It’s the sound of someone turning resentment into release.
The record’s most haunting image comes early in “Falling From and Further,” when Frances, mid-metaphor, confesses an everyday dread: “I merge where it hurts.” It’s just a line about joining traffic, but it lands like a revelation. In a world that feels too heavy, even the simple act of moving forward can be terrifying. Still, she merges. The song opens up again—pedal steel sighs, drums gallop, her voice rises: “More than this, I wish to feel it all.”
That’s the key to Nested in Tangles: not transcendence, but contact. Frances doesn’t escape her anxiety or rewrite her past—she inhabits it fully, until it changes shape. These songs don’t end in resolution but in renewal. By the final note, the nervous head and heart are still there, but they’re pulsing in time.
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