Ella Clayton’s second album ‘Could It Be You?’ is a masterful indie-folk record of poetic lyricism, organic production, and soulful warmth. Reviewed
Ella Clayton has been paying attention. In the four years since her debut album Murmurations, the East London singer-songwriter has been doing what few artists in a hurry to be noticed ever allow themselves to do: living, watching, and writing from the accumulated weight of real experience. The result is Could It Be You?, her second studio album, released April 24, produced by Lester Duval at George Ezra’s London studio Hotel Quebec in just three days of live recording, and expanded in the months after with strings, a male choir, Hammond organ, and layers of guitar tracked across studios and friends’ home setups around the city. It is quietly one of the most considered British folk-soul records in recent memory.
The album opens on its own terms. A mellow guitar riff arrives first, warm and unhurried, pulling your attention out of wherever it was. Ella’s voice follows. It leads, always, but the record around it, including the organic drums, the quavering organ, the well-placed strings, breathes like something alive. Could It Be You? is clearly her record. She is not possessive of it.
The Poetry Is the Point
Clayton studied English literature and poetry, and it shows throughout, not in the way that makes you feel academic distance, but in the way that makes ordinary moments feel newly weighted. “Do you ever get the feeling we were meant to meet / The unfamiliar faces out on the street.” That line from the title track turns a cinema date and a moment of romantic tension into something universally felt. In “I Miss Strangers,” a worn pair of trainers carries the accumulated mystery of the lives they might contain. These are small things. They do not feel small by the time she is finished with them.
Gateway track “Please Me“ arrives in a 6/8 lilt and says everything you need to know about what kind of writer Clayton is. Confident, guarded, precise. “I ain’t never let a lover linger long enough to give me what I want and that’s no lie.” That is not a line that needed a production budget behind it. It needed a voice, and it has one.
“Mouth Said Money” pivots into something rawer, a dirty-edged rock groove with psychedelic reverse guitar and percussion that unsettles. It is not where you expect the album to go, and that is the point. “Ripples“ is a study in sound painting, folk in structure but anguished in feeling. “Dolomites” pushes further still, a lyrical pressure release sweetened with harpsichord that erupts mid-song.
An Album Built to Last
At the centre of the record sits “Rain All Day,” which gives way to the reflective “October Trip,” both of them precise with detail and generous with feeling. “Seagull Song” misleads with its title before opening into an intense, wistful monologue. “Tell Me Something“ finds Clayton in her upper register, fragile and exploratory, with cello rising beneath her as she signs off, “The world keeps on turning.” It is both hopeful and surrendered. The album closes with “Come As You Are,” violins threading through a song about human presence and the specific electricity of finding someone you recognise. “And there you are.” Four words. The effect is disproportionate and entirely earned.
Could It Be You? was recorded partly with musical influences Clayton has cited as defining for her, including Bonnie Raitt, Michael Kiwanuka, Laura Marling, and Jeff Buckley, and it shows in the album’s refusal to sit still in a single genre. Folk, soul, jazz, and pop all move through it, held together by the consistency of her voice and the seriousness of her pen. It is an album that asks for your full attention and rewards it every time.
