When so much popular music integrates footnotes into the main event, it’s a rare treat to approach such a fully formed record knowing so little about an artist, to discern their creative identity and intentions solely through their work. You do not need to know that Daughters concerns the cancer diagnosis and subsequent passing of Walton’s musician father (Nigel Walton had success in the early ’90s as part of eco-feminist dance group Opus III) to feel undone by her cosmic and mundane evocations of grief. This tactile record, mixed by her friend aya, exists between the disconcerting distraction of dreams and the roughhousing confrontation of reality as life rearranges itself in the anticipation and aftermath of a loss.
Walton’s most distinctive trademark is in how she crushes together intricate, organic instrumentation and synths into pummelling cataclysms. Particularly in the first half of the record, her songs climax in joyful attacks that evoke the sounds of a Dance Dance Revolution machine arranged by a symphony orchestra. “Born Again Backwards” shreds the fabric of a once-known reality as gilded, militaristic percussion gives way to something akin to chiptune blastbeats, taking a beat to catch a breath through what sounds like a wheezy toy harmonica, then shooting off once again, spinning Walton’s voice like a top. “Lambs” contemplates looming apocalypse in a concerted attack that sounds like dozens of players slamming wood on metal, an analog recreation of abusing the midi orchestra stab key. The effect is as gorgeous as it is uneasy: Opener “Sometimes” starts as an elegant vignette of dislocation, perky with plucked strings, then relinquishes the exhaustion of maintaining that poise in a nauseous landslide of artillery drums, bleating synths, and brassy squall.
The landscape of Daughters is majestic in its desolation, marked by rattling barns, clapboard houses, dead animals, glowing motels, gas station perfume, infinite skies. As a writer, Walton keys into unavoidably painful and prosaic moments, like sitting “hunched and sick in the concourse” of a hospital on the purgatorial glimmer of “Saints,” the unceasing blip of monitoring machines woven into the fabric of the song, but she also contrasts the drawing of blood with praying for mercy. She has an instinct for myth, characterizing loss in cars crashed into lakes, hungry fires, the haunting feeling of hearing old English folk songs echoing out of context. On the racing title track, familial estrangement, once earthly (“I always muttered something like: ‘He was never around,’” she sings on “Lambs”), then the permanent schism between the living and the dead, is a map torn in two. You can see her world: Serene, obliterating, awesome, it swoops around you like a blizzard.
