There’s something rather wonderful about reaching the point where you stop worrying quite so much about where you’re supposed to fit.
That sense of freedom runs right through Natalie McCool’s new album Good For The Soul, out now following a run of singles that have gradually revealed just how far she was prepared to push things this time around.
From Coming of Age and We’re The Ones to So Lonely, Lonely and I Fantasise, we’ve already heard Natalie move between different sides of her sound. But together as an album, those shifts make considerably more sense.
Good For The Soul begins in a brighter, more playful alt-pop world before gradually venturing somewhere darker, stranger and more atmospheric. Rather than feeling like two competing identities, however, that contrast becomes part of the fun.
“I used to think you had to fit into a particular box as an artist,” Natalie explains. “And in a lot of ways you do. But one of the joys of it is breaking the cage and doing something a bit different.”
And she certainly hasn’t played things safe.
New focus track Sleeping Beauty might be the clearest example of just how adventurous the album becomes. Featuring Louisa Roach from She Drew The Gun, the track takes Natalie’s alt-pop foundations somewhere altogether more disorientating, mixing elements of trip-hop and industrial music with strings, unusual melodies and a deliberately deceptive key.
Natalie affectionately describes it as an “absolute wonky gem of a track”, which is probably as good an invitation to listen as any.
She knew early on that she wanted Louisa involved, with the pair having known each other through Liverpool’s music scene for years.
“The part she wrote, recorded and sent over just floored us,” Natalie says.
That collaboration is far from an isolated moment.
Good For The Soul finds Natalie opening the doors to other artists throughout the record. ilā appears on Suffering after also contributing to Coming of Age as part of Trans Voices, while Ukrainian electronica duo KRAPKA;Koma join her on closing track Into A Diamond. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic can also be heard across several songs.
That collaborative spirit can partly be traced back to Liverpool’s Eurovision Cultural Festival in 2023, where Natalie co-curated and performed a huge show involving musicians from across different genres and backgrounds.
It seems to have changed the way she wanted to approach her own music.
At the same time, Good For The Soul is arguably more Natalie’s record than ever. She produced and mixed the majority of the album herself for the first time, giving her the freedom to follow those ideas wherever they happened to lead.
And they lead to some interesting places.
Nobody Knows is propelled by urgent strings, while Stuck On Repeat (Everytime) grows from something intimate into a much bigger release. The title track throws together huge beats and off-kilter synths with an almost defiant sense of optimism, before Suffering takes things in a considerably harsher direction.
Yet underneath all of those changing sounds is something much simpler.
“The album is called Good For The Soul because it explores the hope, joy and exhilaration of adulthood, and the way every experience makes you who you are – even the bad ones,” Natalie says.
That idea gives the album its heart. It isn’t pretending adulthood is one long voyage of joyous self-discovery, because let’s face it, nobody would believe that. Instead, Natalie allows the joyful, painful, confusing and occasionally downright messy parts to coexist.
By the time Into A Diamond closes the record, there’s a sense of having travelled through all of it rather than simply brushed the difficult moments aside.
And perhaps that’s what makes Good For The Soul such an interesting point in Natalie’s career. After The Great Unknown and Memory Girl, this feels like an artist giving herself permission to be less predictable, whether that means producing her own work, bringing other creative voices into the room or making a song that deliberately tricks your ears into thinking it’s in the wrong key.
Natalie will now take the album out on the road, beginning with an intimate run of record store appearances this month before album launch shows at Liverpool’s Kazimier Stockroom on 9 October and London’s Sebright Arms on 10 October. A further show follows at The Monastery in Manchester on 15 November.
Good For The Soul is out now, with signed CD and limited-edition purple-and-turquoise vinyl editions are also available here!
About Author
