Jennifer Walton’s Cathedrals of Grief
To find out anything about Jennifer Walton, you have to follow her digital breadcrumbs through the internet’s darker corners. The 29-year-old British producer keeps her brilliance scattered: by day, she’s a part-time producer at NTS; by night, she shapeshifts between scenes. She’s a live member of Kero Kero Bonito, co-conspirator in Sarah Midori Perry’s shadowy side project Cryalot, and one-third of the experimental unit Microplastics alongside aya and 96 Back. That crew’s Mutualism label released Walton’s White Nurse in 2019—a power-electronics exorcism that stripped the genre of its fascist hangovers and rebuilt it as a vehicle for transcendence. She’s produced for Iceboy Violet, spun high-octane sets for Boiler Room, and made a theme song for one of the few good music podcasts. Somewhere in there, she also dropped a club EP full of joyous chaos, slipped onto BABii’s and caroline’s records, and resurrected t.A.T.u. in one live set just because she could.
But none of those fragments could possibly prepare you for Daughters, her debut album—a work so vivid, so all-consuming, that it feels less like a career milestone than a rupture in the underground’s faultline. Grief has long inspired musicians to build cathedrals out of pain, but Walton’s approach is maximalist, almost cosmic. Her vision burns with Phil Elverum’s existential awe, Laurie Anderson’s surreal magnetism, and the restless world-building of Julia Holter’s Aviary. Yet she stands alone in her capacity to turn devastation into something sculptural. The record doesn’t just mourn—it disintegrates, rebuilds, and haunts. You don’t need to know it was written in the wake of her father’s death (Nigel Walton of eco-feminist dance group Opus III) to feel the enormity of its sorrow. Mixed by her close collaborator aya, Daughters lives in the uncanny border between dream and daylight, where grief rewires your sense of what’s real.
Walton’s production weaponizes contrast: delicate strings burst into industrial cataclysms, soft breaths warp into metallic avalanches. The first half of the record feels like a symphony composed on a Dance Dance Revolution pad. “Born Again Backwards” collapses under its own brilliance—militaristic percussion melting into chiptune blastbeats before catching its breath through a wheezing toy harmonica. “Lambs” stomps forward like an analog apocalypse, the sound of a hundred hands hammering metal into prayer. Even the opener, “Sometimes,” can’t hold still: what begins as a tender lullaby mutates into a vertigo of drums and brass, exhaustion made orchestral.
Across Daughters, the scenery feels cinematic yet scorched—barns collapsing in wind, gas stations glowing like beacons, dead animals glinting under fluorescent skies. In “Saints,” Walton captures the grim stillness of hospital waiting rooms: “hunched and sick in the concourse,” machines blipping in rhythm with her voice. Her lyrics find poetry in the banal, transcendence in despair. “Shelly” turns the story of a woman crashing her car after hitting a deer into a fable about surrender—“Be the candle in the night,” Walton pleads, her voice ascending as molten synths engulf her like pink lava.
If “Shelly” is grief’s quiet implosion, “Miss America” is its numb aftermath—a robotic ballad that captures the dead stare of loss. “Cattle farm and broke-down shack / Strip mall, drug deal, panic attacks,” she murmurs, her voice warped through vocoder fog, tethered to an unchanging melody that refuses to move forward. But by the time “It Eats Itself” arrives, numbness has curdled into fury. Over a seething bassline, she becomes an apocalyptic prophet, singing of vengeance “with kindling of bone.” It’s grief as combustion, the body as fuel.
The record’s final act, “The Only Way Out Is Through,” offers no false resolution—only a cracked mantra of acceptance. “Love will lead your way home,” Walton and a small choir chant until their voices dissolve into static, as if crossing from one world into another. The song fades like a transmission from the beyond, a reminder that release doesn’t erase pain—it absorbs it.
In just nine songs and 36 minutes, Jennifer Walton crafts a cosmos of mourning and metamorphosis. Daughters is a debut that feels like a reckoning, a record that refuses to be backgrounded or boxed in. You chase her across the internet, but this time, she doesn’t run—she burns.
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