Over the past few years, California singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Madison Cunningham has quietly become one of indie’s most admired technicians. Her guitar playing is a small marvel—fluid, harmonically inventive, and instantly recognizable. She’s quietly omnipresent, too: opening for Hozier and Harry Styles, guesting on records by Lucius and Mumford & Sons, performing with Sara Bareilles and Chris Thile, and teaming up with Andrew Bird for a Buckingham Nicks covers album. It’s a résumé tailor-made for NPR playlists, but Cunningham’s work rarely settles for easy charm. Her 2022 single “In From Japan” is a perfect snapshot of her idiosyncratic style: a shimmering, syncopated 7/4 groove that takes aim at the commodification of music. “Watermark/They’re trying to own the image nature carved,” she sings. “Well, metadata won’t support your cause.”
That same year, Cunningham released Revealer, a Grammy-winning breakthrough made with industry veterans Matt Chamberlain, Dan Wilson, and Mike Elizondo. But the victory didn’t bring much peace. Soon after, she met Wendy Melvoin (Prince’s former guitarist), who told her, “You have something to say, and you aren’t saying it yet,” before playing Martha Wainwright’s scathing “Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole.” The comment landed hard. Within months, Cunningham divorced her husband of five years—her teenage church sweetheart—and began writing at the piano instead of the guitar, channeling the confessional directness of Joni Mitchell’s Blue (fittingly, Cunningham once covered “California”).
The result is Ace, her most ambitious and emotionally raw project yet. Where Revealer was angular and groove-driven, Ace feels fluid and orchestral, full of quietly dazzling harmonic turns and odd time signatures tucked beneath its lush veneer. The string and woodwind arrangements—by Cunningham, Rob Moose of yMusic, Philip Krohnengold, and Mercury Rev’s Jesse Chandler—push her sound into near–Joanna Newsom territory. It’s chamber pop for the emotionally wrecked. Even the album’s simplest moments carry tension: on “Wake,” Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold adds wavering, dissonant harmonies that make the song feel like a warped Simon & Garfunkel vinyl. Beneath the elegance, grief simmers. On “Skeletree,” Cunningham murmurs, “Something’s got to give,” before erupting into a full-throated confession: “I don’t trust what you say/But I’ve come to lose my faith in everyone.”
If Revealer was about control, Ace is about letting go. The album traces the slow process of detangling yourself from another person after betrayal. Cunningham never spells out the story, but the emotional detail is all there. On “My Full Name,” she observes, “Your brother only shares your family shame/But he doesn’t really know you.” “Mummy” begins like a lullaby—somewhere between Regina Spektor and Kate Bush—but unfolds into a reckoning: “I never could explain myself, the hurt that I feel, the hurt that I cause.” By the final verse, she turns that line outward, implicating the other side of the breakup. Even “Take Two,” with its image of a lover who “knows every mole and skin tag,” wrestles with the distance that remains between two people who once knew everything about each other.
Cunningham sidesteps the clichés of the “divorce album” with an almost surgical precision. She earns her plainspoken moments—like “Some days I hate you so much/I want you back”—because they arrive amid such compositional complexity. Even on the breezy ’70s soft-rock pastiche “Beyond That Moon,” she cuts deep with a single line: “I’d stay under your skin if I were convinced that there were room.” Only the lead single “My Full Name” plays things a bit too safe, smoothing over the emotional and musical edges that make Ace so rewarding.
At its best, Ace is a quietly relentless album—an elegant storm of grief, control, and release. It’s proof that Cunningham is no longer just a “musician’s musician,” but a songwriter willing to take the messiest parts of life and arrange them into something symphonic.
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