For years, Eleri Ward has been celebrated as the rare artist who could reimagine Stephen Sondheim with the intimacy of indie-folk, turning Broadway’s grandeur into candlelit confessionals. Her debut album of originals, Internal Rituals, out September 26, is both a continuation and a rupture: an excavation of self where the theatrical meets the celestial, where trauma, self-love, and quiet transcendence collide in a lush, ethereal soundscape.
From the opening track “Stepping Through,” Ward signals a shift. Gone are the stripped-back acoustic settings of A Perfect Little Death; instead, intricate vocal layers and ambient electronics give her soprano a new expanse. Her vibrato, always striking, now feels less like ornament and more like invocation, carrying lyrics that probe cycles of memory and meaning. The songs feel less like performances and more like meditations, each one an offering to the listener’s inner world.
“Float” captures this best: a leap into uncertainty buoyed by airy synths and a rhythm that hovers just above the ground. “Someone, Something New” digs deeper, threading her complicated relationship with her biological father into a psychedelic, almost surrealist arrangement that mirrors the way trauma resurfaces in fragments. On “Run,” perhaps the album’s most immediate track, Ward builds piano and synth into a pulsating release, a sonic shedding of skin that crystallizes her commitment to growth.
What ties Internal Rituals together is not genre. It floats between cinematic pop, spectral jazz, and indie-pop shimmer. What grounds it is perspective. Ward’s lyrics consistently turn inward, asking how cycles can be broken, how self-worth is constructed, how love can be redefined. In “Venusian Light,” her devotion to self-love glows quietly, while “People Pleaser” offers one of her rawest admissions, acknowledging the ways she has contorted herself to fit others’ expectations.
The album closes with “Goodbye, Sojourna” and “Venusian Light,” songs that feel less like conclusions than openings. In them, Ward does not tie up her narrative as much as she dissolves it, leaving the listener suspended in the same liminal space the album inhabits, where endings are beginnings and growth is cyclical.
With Internal Rituals, Eleri Ward has flipped the script on her own artistry. It is not just the sound of a theater-trained voice finding its way in contemporary pop. It is the sound of an artist teaching herself to trust her own vision, and inviting us to do the same.
Featured Image: Artist Supplied
