There’s something quietly radical about how Basia Bulat has navigated her career. While her contemporaries zigzag between reinventions, Bulat has moved in gentle iterations, each album a subtle reshaping rather than a wholesale renovation. Her seventh record, “Basia’s Palace,” continues this approach—not so much a new chapter as a familiar room viewed from a different angle, the light catching previously unnoticed details.
Coming five years after “Are You In Love?”—that beautiful, overlooked album that had the cosmic misfortune of dropping as the world locked down in March 2020—this new collection finds Bulat reconnecting with producer Mark Lawson after her two-album stint with My Morning Jacket’s Jim James. The reunion feels significant; Lawson (who helmed Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs”) has helped Bulat craft something notably sunnier than her recent output, though shadows still stretch across these nine songs.
From the moment “My Angel” kicks off the record, you can feel that shift. It floats in on a disco-adjacent groove, capturing new love’s giddy disorientation. Drew Jurecka’s string arrangements give the track an almost tactile dimension—think early Lykke Li if she’d been raised on ’70s AM radio. This warmth permeates the album’s first half, creating a sense of being wrapped in something both familiar and new.
I got genuinely choked up during “Disco Polo,” named after the Polish urban folk music her father loved. Bulat’s heritage becomes the framework for something transcendent here, especially when she slips into Polish lyrics midway through. “Mama would play her guitar, and Papa had his Disco Polo,” she sings, and those fragments of memory feel as vivid as photographs. Few songwriters can make nostalgia feel this present-tense.
Even better is “Baby,” a song Bulat apparently started years ago but revisited after becoming a parent herself. What a payoff—the way it builds from intimate whispers to jubilant release reminds me why patient songwriting still matters in our instant-gratification era. The joy coursing through this track isn’t manufactured; it’s earned through lived experience.
Around the halfway mark, Bulat pivots. “The Moon” drifts in like midnight fog, its orchestrations creating space rather than filling it. Then “Laughter” arrives, stripping back to minimal synths that wouldn’t sound out of place on an early Kate Bush record. Here, Bulat’s voice—that gossamer instrument with surprising muscle—really shows its range. When her trademark autoharp enters, it feels like running into an old friend you didn’t realize you missed.
By the time “Curtain Call” closes the album with nothing but Bulat and a barely-there electric guitar, you’ve traveled somewhere significant without quite realizing the journey was happening. It’s the kind of song that transforms whatever space it occupies—car, kitchen, concert hall—into somewhere more intimate, more honest.
What strikes me most about “Basia’s Palace” isn’t innovation—Bulat isn’t chasing trends or trying to crack some algorithmic code to relevance. Instead, she’s achieved something harder: making music that sounds completely unconcerned with how it will be received. In an era where TikTok virality and playlist placement drive creative decisions, there’s something almost rebellious about this stance.
Mind you, this approach has drawbacks. Some arrangements float by so effortlessly they barely leave fingerprints in the memory. Tracks like “Right Now” and “Daylight” feel pleasantly ephemeral while playing but evaporate quickly afterward. The album’s consistent mood occasionally borders on sameness—a comfortable room you might not feel compelled to revisit often.
This project apparently began taking shape during 2022, when Bulat found herself navigating new circumstances—new home, new family—with space to process old memories. She switched up her compositional approach too, experimenting with MIDI instead of her usual piano/guitar foundations. The result is music that somehow manages to look backward and forward simultaneously, like those Japanese paintings where perspective works in multiple directions.
Throughout it all, Bulat’s voice remains the guiding light—sweet without being cloying, vulnerable without seeming fragile. There’s always been something slightly otherworldly in her tone, particularly in those upper registers where a gentle vibrato adds emotional texture without turning melodramatic.
Will “Basia’s Palace” dramatically expand Bulat’s audience? Probably not. It’s too subtle for that, too committed to its own wavelength. But honestly, I’m not sure that’s the point. For those already tuned to her frequencies, this record offers quiet revelations that unfold with repeated listens—like a palace with secret passageways that reveal themselves only to the patient explorer. The treasures are there, tucked away in corners, waiting for the right light to make them shine.
BASIA’S PALACE is OUT FEBRUARY 21 VIA SECRET CITY RECORDS
