Jesse Mac Cormack’s at last beginning to see what his music is all about. His second studio album is piercing as a look, tender as a goodbye - a collection of electronic songs that lift and crash like waves upon a shore. After a recording process that was by turns nourishing and peaceful, lonely and anguished, the gifts of time, distance and therapy have allowed the Montreal songwriter to finally understand everything he wants to say. Solo, which gleams and shivers and pulses with the heartbeat of an artist in beautiful evolution, was recorded over the course of a year and a half, from the before-times to lockdown to a newly tranquil present. This is a softer album than Now, Mac Cormack’s acclaimed debut from 2019, but it’s riven by the fear and flood and disappointment that marked these recent years - and the singer’s childhood. Everything he is - it comes from what he lived through. And now, finally understanding this, that has begun to stop being in reaction to it.