Azure Beryl opens her debut EP with a funeral. “I seen a box this one was taken / it was carrying someone kind” arrives in the first verse of “Dandelion Honey” before the chorus pulls the lens back to childhood and the particular grief of realizing, too late, that you could have been happier then. “Not everyone gets to age / revisit favorite places” is a line that earns its weight without explaining itself. The Canadian singer-songwriter and composer builds her world from piano and vocals with melancholic lyrics, and Jones, her six-song debut, establishes that world with a confidence unusual for an early-career release.
The EP explores ambivalence and longing across six tracks, but what distinguishes it from other piano-and-vocals releases working similar emotional territory is the precision of the imagery. “Dandelion Honey” grounds its meditation on memory in specific sensation, a seven-year-old watching her mother cry, friends lost to time and pride, the smoky and fiery world seen from childhood. Cheers to memory lane on dandelion honey days is the kind of toast made in retrospect, and Beryl delivers it with the exact bittersweet register it requires.
“Love Is” works through the uncertainty of not knowing whether you would recognize love if it arrived. “Wouldn’t know if I had it / if I’m being honest, I’m just as scared to find it / would it feel insipid” is a more honest accounting of emotional ambivalence than most love songs attempt, and the image of a pour of rain she can’t contain gives the feeling a physical quality that keeps the lyric from drifting into abstraction. The young summer years hurried through, the reveries buried with the moon, the tender days that came too soon: time moves through this EP as both subject and structuring force.
“Illuminate” is the EP’s most expansive moment, Klein Blue frescoes and silent movies and ballet rooms conjuring a world where old and new meet in the light of something that might be art, might be history, might be the future heard in a stranger’s phrasing. “I’ve seen wasted lands reviving / and I’ve been where history’s in the making” arrives as a counterpoint to the earlier sense of loss, the endlessly repeated outro building through hallowed lore and rooms and doors into something genuinely hypnotic.
“Some Days” carries the EP’s most resigned emotional register, the carousel of years given away, the house empty, never knowing why, love falling out of love as gradually as growing up becomes growing grey. “What a wonderful tale / start again one more time / from the top with the ache of a wonderful life” is not cynicism. It’s the particular exhaustion of someone who keeps finding the beauty in things that keep ending.
“Stardust” moves into cosmological territory with the lightness the subject requires. “Stories exquisite and wounded inside / like mine, like mine” is the EP’s most nakedly personal moment, the shared humanity of lows and woes and aching desires offered as connection rather than confession. The image of becoming stardust on an infinite ride carries genuine peace rather than performed transcendence.
“I Wish You’d Stay” closes the EP with its most formally controlled lyric. “I’ve memorized all your faces, lilts, and paces / beside you in this life is a haven” moves toward the inevitable loss of someone loved, the clocks making years while the helpless wait devastates and ripples. Beryl doesn’t name who she’s singing to, which is the right decision. The grief is specific enough in its details to feel personal and open enough in its frame to belong to anyone who has sat with the knowledge that time is running.
Jones is a debut that arrives knowing exactly what it wants to say and saying it.
Jones is available now.
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