Taken from the album Me And Ennui Are Friends, Baby.

Comprised entirely of minimal solo piano arrangements, Ennui is despondently clear-eyed and smirkingly self-deprecating, completing a trilogy of records that started with 'The Queen Who Stole The Sky' and her only outing to date featuring a full band, 'Please Daddy'.

Each record has followed Chadwick’s internal processing after a traumatic event, with Chadwick’s zeal for psychoanalysis front and centre. On Ennui, Chadwick presents an exacting intensity with her choice to pare back to piano and vocals. It's in this stark setting that she focuses on the attempt she made on her life in 2019.

Just weeks before the Ennui recordings in 2019, Chadwick endured the breakup of a long term relationship and attempted her own life. These events followed the deaths of her father and a close friend, and it’s from this weighty internal mire that Chadwick emerges throughout the trilogy. Imaginably, the result is staggeringly abject.

However, the incandescent nature of her will, knack for reportage and searing dark humour sets fire to the world she describes over these 12 songs. Lead single “Every Loser Needs A Mother” offers a glimpse into this dark humour, as Chadwick describes an undesired need to take care of a dependant man: “Well I laid out his clothes // And I laughed at his jokes // And I stumbled around in // Heels and no clothes // And I went to his hell // And he kicked me out.” The track touches on all-too familiar tropes, Chadwick’s voice commanding and wryly confessional over piano.

The methods Chadwick employed on Ennui contrast those of her previous full-band record, which thrust her into a very different world of rehearsal, planning, restraint and control as a functional tool. The result, 2020’s critically acclaimed Please Daddy, was her most aching and engaging achievement to date: “a raw, often unnerving experience,” which “delivers compelling and uplifting catharsis” (Mojo). Recording Ennui shortly after the Please Daddy sessions, Chadwick concludes her trilogy by returning to the most immediate compositional process she can muster, doing it alone, with less between her and the microphone than ever before. Joined by long time production collaborators, Ennui was mastered by David Walker at Stepford Audio and mixed and recorded by Geoff O’Connor at Vanity Lair - both expertly bringing scale, subtlety and intangible ascendence to this recording. On Ennui, Chadwick is free, there is nowhere for her or us to run from the need to very presently and repeatedly articulate her trauma until it is simply, “articulated out.”

Sarah Mary Chadwick - Full Mood

Ba Da Bing Records/Grapefruit Records