What was the first album you bought? Jessica Winter answers that slightly tired question by way of the songs on her debut album, which appears to flip through the CD collection (or wheel through the iPod) of a teenager in the 2000s. Across forty-five minutes we encounter sun-coming-up piano beats, Fever-era Kylie Minogue, inklings of Gwen Stefani and Lily Allen, crunchy alt-90s guitars, a bit of Beck, and even – shudder – The Feeling.
My First Album is a title that also raises an eyebrow to the fact Winter’s releasing her solo debut after well over a decade in the industry. She graduated from the punk scene in her hometown of Portsmouth and years of gigging with bands to form Pregoblin with Fat White Family’s Alex Sebley. But since 2019 she’s struck out alone, a decision that appears to be paying off. It’s always nice to see people making the art they want to after years of graft. “I’ve been in somebody else’s skin and it’s not done a fucking thing,” she sings on ‘To Know Her’, the album’s musical theatre-indebted closing tune. “I can make my own idea of me.”
After the twisting sitar and electrocrash vibrations of opener ‘Nirvana’, a trio of the aforementioned Kylie-ish songs, and ‘Big Star’ (Lily Allen, but a little less crystalline bitch, a little more Mika), comes the excellent ‘Worst Person In The World’, named after the 2021 Joachim Trier film. Winter can do campy maximalist pop, but she also shines on Garbage-esque 90s alt-rock numbers such as ‘All I Ever Really Wanted’, ‘Wannabe’, and ‘Got Something Good’ (the latter quickly atoning for those The Feeling crimes it commits in its intro) – a style that suits her dainty doll vocals, which elsewhere start to rankle.
You could spend days mapping the landscape of My First Album, which is woven with enough references to flummox and delight any pop nerd. The trouble with this approach – artist as nostalgic fangirl – is that it leaves you wondering who Jessica Winter is, and what her sound might have to say other than “I really love the music of my youth”. (It’s a similar issue Rina Sawayama faced on her 2022 album Hold The Girl.) Of course, if you happen to be a fan of that same music, and you appreciate well-crafted pop songs teeming with hooks, My First Album is almost certainly for you.
If Winter is like anyone, she’s most like Sparks: theatrical, trying on the costumes of other sounds, never making the same song twice. Fingers crossed for a similarly long career of albums, then, one that grants Winter enough space to explore all that she crams into My First Album.
