The singer-songwriter’s darkest album yet confronts loss, illness, and the weight of inheritance.
Scout Paré-Phillips has always been an artist who defies easy categorisation. A classically trained soprano with a country croon, a post-punk balladeer, and a collaborator with Jack White, her music is as multifaceted as her life experiences.
With Lupine Daughter, her third solo LP, she delivers her darkest, most visceral work yet. An album steeped in loss, illness, and raw emotional catharsis.
Recorded in the wake of her father’s and grandfather’s deaths, Lupine Daughter is a deeply personal reckoning with mortality, addiction, and the toll of autoimmune disease (lupus, which she was diagnosed with during its creation).
Gone is the autoharp and the soaring soprano of her earlier work; instead, she embraces a grittier sound, anchored by her custom baritone guitar and a voice that oscillates between a wounded growl and a fragile whisper.
Tracks like Claw and Fatal lay bare the physical and emotional ravages of illness, while Pop’s Song serves as a heartbreaking tribute to her grandfather, whose love was a sanctuary in a turbulent childhood.
The album’s instrumentation mirrors its themes: heavy, brooding, and unflinchingly honest. The band’s arrangements amplify the rawness, with sludgy guitar tones and pounding rhythms underscoring lyrics that grapple with fear, resignation, and fleeting moments of defiance.
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On A Gambler Who Owned a Racehorse, she confronts her father’s alcoholism with a mix of bitterness and sorrow, while Gasoline (one of the record’s fiercer cuts) channels frustration into snarling rock energy.
Lupine Daughter is not an easy listen, but it’s a necessary one. Paré-Phillips doesn’t offer tidy resolutions, just stark, beautiful truths.
It’s the sound of an artist staring down her demons and refusing to blink.
