Esther Rose’s 2023 record Safe To Run was a strong, lyrically confessional heavy album that proved she was more than ready for a much larger audience. With Want, she brings a bolder musical style to match the lyrics. She pulls in a number of collaborators to fill out the band, like members of Video Age, The Deslondes, and Silver Synthetic.
With bolder, at times brasher arrangements, she edges away from the solitude of her earlier efforts towards a full band sound, making for a wildly satisfying record. You can hear the change teased on the stellar opening title track that begins with an acoustic guitar building like a wave to a fuller sound complete with backing vocals. But it’s on “Had To,” the third track – with the instruments layering nicely on top of each other – where the change is the clearest. By the time you get to “New Bad,” toward the end of the record – a track that begins like a standard indie pop song before diving into shoegaze with buzzing, swirling guitars – she has completely conquered any preconceived notions of what to expect from an Esther Rose album.
Impressively, despite the musical change, she has continued down the self-confessional lyrical style that made Safe To Run such a compelling record. Want came at a pivotal time for Rose, who was exhausted and even considered leaving music before eventually getting to work on this one. She quit drinking and sought therapy. As she began to collect these seemingly unrelated snippets of songs, she considered different genres, ranging from electro-pop to a more subdued acoustic path. But like everyone from The Replacements to The Stones, luckily for us, she ultimately chose rock and roll. But that’s not to say the amps were always set at 11.
Like The Stones’ “Wild Horses” and The Replacements’ “Rock n’ Roll Ghost,” Rose, too, has her quieter moments here, like on “Color Wheel,” a hauntingly sweet piano ballad. The album closes on “Want Pt. 2,” which starts out a cappella before building to a slow and steady sing-along (complete with the line, “You can’t always get what you want”). The song is not only the perfect bookend to the opening title track, but beautifully covers the album’s mix of soft and at times rowdier moments, all in just over 5 minutes.
