On ‘Love and Devotion,’ Philly sibling duo Sam and Louise Sullivan craft warm, surreal folk-pop that reaches past its roots
“Red, red apple/Pretty, pretty pear.” No, that is not a line lifted from a baby sensory video. It is the opening image of “There You Go Again,” a highlight from Sam and Louise Sullivan’s playful third album, Love and Devotion. The Philadelphia sibling duo build songs that burst with bright colors and smiling fruit, and on their new record they aim that childlike wonder at something warmer and stranger than the folk world that raised them. The result is a set of folk-pop gems that feel familiar and slightly surreal at once, arriving at a moment when guitar-based songwriting is once again reaching for the uncanny.
That reach is the whole point. This is a record made by two people steeped in the folk tradition who clearly want to travel somewhere else sonically. You can hear the lineage in the harmonies, the way their voices lock together with the unforced blend that only siblings seem to manage. But you can also hear them straining, in the best sense, against the coffeehouse expectations that trail an act like this through venues like Johnny Brenda’s or across the lawn at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival.
A Stream of Consciousness With the Lights On
The obvious touchstone here is “Waters of March,” the bossa nova classic that turns a list of small objects into a meditation on life and death. The Sullivans share that windy stream-of-consciousness instinct, the way a lyric can pile up nouns until they start to shimmer. More recent kin might be Big Thief’s “Not,” another song that catalogs the world in a rush.
The crucial difference is temperature. Where those songs let simple pleasures curdle into something darker, Love and Devotion is happy to stay in the middle, basking in daylight rather than chasing dread. Some listeners will want more shadow. But there is real craft in a record that refuses to weaponize its own sweetness.
The production, shaped alongside collaborators Kevin Basko and Emily Moales, is what keeps the album from tipping into preciousness. The Sullivans famously began as home recordings made on a USB microphone between loads of laundry, and you can still feel that intimacy underneath the fuller arrangements. Reel-to-reel tape and live-room looseness give these songs a lived-in quality, so even the sunniest melodies carry a little grain.
Small Surprises, Real Ambition
What saves Love and Devotion from mere pleasantness is how often it lets a strange detail slip in. A guitar solo dissolves into an unexpected bagpipe texture. “My Guy” opens with a smear of backwards tape that keeps resurfacing like a half-remembered dream, psychedelics applied tastefully rather than slathered on. “After All These Years” builds with the verse-to-chorus lift of an actual hit, the kind of pop mechanics folk purists pretend to be above. “Irish Goodbye” is a genuinely moving ballad about letting go, and the closer, “Treehugger,” pulses with an electro heartbeat that points somewhere new, a signpost toward whatever these two make next.
That forward lean matters. The Sullivans have already logged two albums, Papier Mâché and Sweet Enough, and a family-band résumé that runs from Carnegie Hall to sea-shanty singalongs at the South Street Seaport. Love and Devotion is the sound of a duo consolidating that history into something poppier and more assured without sanding off the weirdness that makes them worth hearing. It does not beat you over the head with its quality. It entices you in, then lays you out song by song. In a year crowded with folk acts chasing gravity, the Sullivans make a quietly convincing case for staying curious, colorful, and a little bit off. Sometimes the middle is exactly where the interesting things grow.
