Vera Sola

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

In the beginning, there were shadows (“Shades,” the blessed year 2018), brought into focus in a breathless poetic intensity: Vera Sola’s America is an unprecedented glimpse—a gothic-noir tale of a wild and shadowy Nashville, the kind few have dared to tell.

For Peacemaker, American singer-songwriter Danielle Ackroyd (a.k.a. Vera Sola) enlisted co-producer Kenneth Pattengale (of The Milk Carton Kids) and a cadre of musicians to carve out a sonic vision no longer confined to the stripped-down past of voice, guitar, and the few melancholically dream-pop remnants that hovered somewhere between the sensitivity of Marissa Nadler and the solitary dramaturgy of Leonard Cohen.

The decision to broaden the instrumental palette—with a full band, string and brass sections—works entirely in favor of the authenticity of the characters and the stories of solitude, love, and violence that form the album’s backdrop.
Although released in 2024, Peacemaker was largely conceived and recorded in 2019; the artist let the eleven songs marinate through the years of the pandemic and emotional isolation, eventually shaping them into a theatrical and musical pamphlet halfway between Tom Waits and Calexico—and the result is dazzling, magical.

Peacemaker is a record that never hides its tormented nature. The transition from past to present is made clear from the very first two tracks: “Bad Idea” momentarily evokes the imagery of the debut, but the fluttering Penguin Café-style strings offer the first clues of a shift, while the pop-rock-surf swagger of “The Line” definitively signals Vera Sola’s semantic revolution—with filthy, grimy rock’n’roll rhythms.

The album title is a declaration of love for the gunslingers of the Old West (which we return to in the closing track), a bygone world that in Danielle’s hands becomes dreamlike and fatefully carnal: Latin-tinged atmospheres take on noir hues (“Get Wise”), while yellowed pages from never-written diaries are elegantly adorned by piano and guitar duets over the delicate notes of an old waltz (“Is That You?”).

Songs of love and everyday emotion are not absent from Peacemaker’s vast yet essential landscape: these are melodically disordered and heart-wrenching ballads, once again invoking the maudit charm of Tom Waits (“I’m Lying”), with unexpected bursts of Patsy Cline-style emotion yielding one of the album’s most expansive moments (“Desire Path”), and hints of hybrid electronic textures that do not alter the visceral, ghostly essence of the ballads (“Waiting,” also intoxicated with Patsy Cline-style harmonies).

Vera Sola’s second album bears all the hallmarks of an instant classic—a record destined to grow over time, a story in which the darkest pages are made radiant by the distant echo of percussion and strings caught in painterly decadence (“Bird House”), or where Nick Cave-style murder ballads are mocked by a sarcasm worthy of David Lynch or the Coen brothers (“Hands”).

What makes the words and melodies burn even brighter is the author’s magnificent voice, her vibrato cutting through the roughest, rawest tones of the record (“Blood Bond”) with the same intensity she brings to the bold and intricate “Instrument Of War”—a song that, through the allegorical tale of a Colt pistol called “Peacemaker,” encapsulates the ambiguous duality of a tool for both life and death: a symbol of modern unease and the unwitting protagonist of one of the year’s first sonic shocks.

06/02/2024