Liesa Van der Aa

‘Like a snail on a razor.’ That’s how a friend of Liesa Van der Aa described her new album ‘Caramel’ — as softness that wraps itself around sharp edges, yet never allows itself to be cut. A fitting image, for with ‘Caramel’, Liesa presents her most personal work to date. The “younger, softer sister” to Liesa Van der Aa’s previous album, ‘Easy Alice’, still inhabits the same jazzy universe. Although, to name just a few references: you can hear echoes of Laurie Anderson, this time interwoven with the early classics of James Blake and snippets of Billie Eilish and FKA Twigs. Electronic, contemporary classical, baroque, jazz and hip-hop — ‘Caramel’, as Van der Aa herself likes to describe it, wears all these coats at once, nonchalantly layered one over the other. And on top of that, more than ever before, the masks fall away. “I wanted to make a record that feels like you’re hearing someone’s thoughts out loud,” she says. “As if you’re perched on the very edge of someone’s consciousness, before everything has been spoken.”