Kate Bollinger's influences harmonise on Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind

After an early string of airtight head-boppers, Kate Bollinger gradually opened the doors on her charming bedroom pop, refurnishing her sound with vintage pop, 60s rock, and moments of dreamy psychedelia.

The 2020 rerelease of “A Couple Things” felt like a watershed – the original’s acoustic strum swapped out for watery guitar tones and the jangly, jazz-flecked arrangements that characterise her sound today. And in the 4 years since, the Charlottesville-born singer has moved across the country, collaborated liberally, and put together a debut album that speaks to this determined curiosity. Much like its accompanying music videos, the album is playful and quaint, and brings styles together on what feels almost like a whim, as if friends have met up to jam and inadvertently stumbled on something timeless.

The trick, of course, is that it only sounds effortlessly cool: in reality, her many influences are pulled in deliberately and with detail. There are grand theatrics on “I See It Now”, while a dusty americana creeps in on “Sweet Devil”: the latter spins into a muddy guitar solo that is unlike anything we’ve heard on a Bollinger track before. But this new space is managed confidently, because the album never loses sight of her folk-bound comforts, finding a tranquil centre in this decade-spanning taste. The result is Faye Webster by way of George Harrison and Pavement.

And the work thrives in these contrasts: the songs feel broad, but also materially delicate. The honeyed, slightly-muffled piano riff on “Lonely” might convince you that you just cradled a vinyl out of its wilting sleeve. But as a whole, the album is cinematic – not in the way we might describe the late-night, empty-road drifting of Beach House, but in the sense that we’re hearing a detailed, emotionally complete world. Each track is textured with the visual mind of somebody who only pursues a musical idea when "seeing a movie in my head to go along with it". And while the mise-en-scène is busy, it’s also domestic and familiar.

For all its whimsy, Songs is tender and melancholy too. The sleepy sway of “To Your Own Devices” is the album at its most hypnotic, which is all the more remarkable as she wrote the track in a single day. But this sort of careful arrangement - a warm, tight bass moving around airy vocals and sedate drumming - comes naturally to Bollinger.

It’s the same story on “Running”, which first released back in 2022, but holds up as an album highlight. And if Kate Bollinger’s music is a daydream, then “Running” is her acceptance that escapism is finite – “I can’t keep up it seems / Even in my dreams”, she resigns over woozy guitar lines. Putting something so vulnerable in the very middle of the album might go some way to revealing what this broad collage of songs is here to tell us. In her own words: “I think I’ve made lots of things that don’t really reflect who I am anymore, but [Running] feels representative of the core of who I am.”

This album was lurking in 2019’s “Candy” and 2022’s “Lady in the Darkest Hour”, folk-pop singles that sound like different versions of the same daydream she’s reliving here. But now the arrangements are more curious, surprising, and lived-in.

In a recent Instagram post, Kate Bollinger dedicates the zany “To Your Own Devices” video to her friends who helped turn storyboards into cinema: "Nikki sourced an old oven", "Eve handmade all of the signs", and "Ode built everything from the ground up". Bollinger – who’s inspired by the music of her older brothers; who inherited CDs from older classmates; who plays alongside longtime friend and drummer, Jacob Grissom – is an artist driven by community.

It feels that Songs From A Thousand Frames Of Mind is made from everything she has ever surrounded herself with: it is hers, it is theirs, and now, thankfully, it is ours too.