Kathryn Williams’s new album is Mystery Park and is her first since the hugely endearing Willson Williams project. Released in 2024, that collaborative project was co-penned and performed with celebrated Edinburgh-based cult-indie songwriter Dan Willson (aka Withered Hand)*.
She said: “This record is for anyone who’s felt something and kept it quiet. For those private echoes. I hope these songs give people space to hear their own.”
Mystery Park LP review
Her last solo outing, Night Drives (2022), won her many plaudits. Her new solo effort’s acoustic guitar-driven sweetness tinged with melancholy does indeed echo the Willson/Williams duets. It also marks a departure from the electronic glitches and darker production of Night Drives. Pop indie folk hookery is more prominent.
Unique musical location
Having said this, Mystery Park is in its own unique musical location. It’s full of strange glittering moments in Williams’s inimitable voice, folk indie pop seen through a Lennon and McCartney lens.
Opener, ‘Thoughts Of My Own’ combines a sweet reflective tone with dives into melancholy, in an ‘Eleanor Rigby’-style. It resurfaces with a strange joy at the sense that we are all alone in our minds as individuals. Couplets like “these days I don’t get past the porch/I’m as useful in the daytime, as a torch” are playful and comical (reminiscent of Willson Williams at times). Similarly, the “thoughts that go nowhere…that I won’t share” simultaneously confronts a weariness with age and loneliness that has the potential to make it depressing, but doesn’t.
There is a joy with a life lived. “I’ve danced the years” and the “thoughts that I won’t share” are, of course, somehow shared in the singing of the song. The image of “the evening light on the house over the road”, which ends the song, a silver lining, which often seems to crystallise in these songs, when Williams’s warm vocal, takes the melancholy of her words somewhere else.
Joyful and uplifting
The joyful and uplifting ‘Goodbye to Summer’, carries a sadness of seasonal cycles into a life-affirming burst that acknowledges time may “drip through fingers” and there are “only so many” summers in a life. However, there is so much warmth in “swallows and swifts” catching the sun, that the relish of the warmth we feel outdoes the reality that it is going or even already “gone”.
The slower and more fragile ‘Gossamer Wings’ builds into an equally uplifting thing. As it takes flight, nature abounds in the images of “dragonflies” and “fireflies” soaring.
‘Tender’, a quiet and even more spare ‘Norwegian Woody’ piece, brings us back down to earth. With the feeling of “pavements of grey” through the soles of “trainers” the reflective “love blossoms and falls” prompting the question: is being sensitive to the world around us a joy or a curse, but seems to imply its own answer. If Williams wasn’t this tender, we would feel the loss.
Self-reflective
The self-reflective ‘This Mystery’, which sits at the heart of the album, and is the album’s title, claims that “even love cannot complete the mystery” of life. While you think it’s about one thing, it seems to shift and change as you listen into something else.
What is most moving about Williams’s dance with music and words is that the lyrics could easily sit in a book of Carol Ann Duffy poems (someone she has also collaborated with). They are that solid and sharp. Yet her voice carries them into the air and off any page. For those who listen they retain their weight and substance as they soar and sing.
Passing wisdom down
Live favourite ‘Sea Of Shadows’, which recounts the ageing of her son, complete in “MF Doom cartoon t-shirt”, walks again the line between loss and affirmation. It situates Williams as a parent passing down the wisdom: “Don’t explain who you are…why apologise for an open heart?”, which is hugely moving and life affirming.
This is also true of the first single off the album. ‘Personal Paradise’ proclaims that Williams is content “leaning against the wall, knowing you are all in there” in a paradise she is unable to enter. We sense this is somehow voicing her career as a songwriter, someone who has cultivated her own unique and prolific patch of ground, full of shadows and light. Because of its fringe commerciality it has a beauty that is richer and more potent and more real.
Final thoughts
Let’s leave the final words to Kathryn.
“This is the most personal record I’ve made,” she said. “The artwork is my own painting, based on the willow pattern from my grandmother’s tea sets. Each part of it ties into the songs – a map of memories.”
Mystery Park comes out 26 September 2025 via One Little Independent Records.
*Dan Willson (aka Withered Hand) returns to play at Chelmsford’s Hot Box this Saturday (16 August. Doors 12:30 PM). Why not head over to DICE FM to secure your ticket?
Dan is set to release his first new, solo, album in nine years. How To Love was recorded with Mogwai producer Tony Doogan in Glasgow and features guests King Creosote and Kathryn Williams. Check out Dan’s interview with Joe Harvey, who wrote the gorgeous review above, by clicking here.
