Georgia Harmer’s Eye of the Storm doesn’t chase fireworks. It’s not trying to knock you sideways in the first thirty seconds. Instead, it lets the air in, space for her band, space for the listener, and space for herself. You could call it restraint, but it lands more like quiet assurance. This isn’t a record made to prove anything; it’s one she seems entirely at home inside.
I first saw Harmer back in 2022 at Montreal’s Casa del Popolo. Even then, just after her debut Stay In Touch, she had that unforced presence, the kind that doesn’t need big gestures. Music runs in her family. Her father, Gord Tough, has played guitar for Sarah Harmer, her aunt, and for Kathleen Edwards (who also has a new album out this month). But lineage only gets you so far. The rest has to be lived in.
The album opens with Can We Be Still, a question that lingers over the rest of the record. Stillness here isn’t about stopping. It’s about slowing enough to notice. Her arrangements move like shifting weather, a cymbal shimmer, a guitar leaning into a chord rather than hitting it square, a bass note left hanging just long enough to make you lean forward.
The title track, started at 18 and finished years later, sits at the album’s centre. It’s quiet, almost hesitant, tracing the toll of carrying someone else’s weight. Harmer’s voice is clear but never ornamental, the band moving with her like they’ve all been through the same long conversation.
Relationships anchor much of this record, though they rarely arrive in tidy arcs. Hazel vs the Coyote mourns the loss of two family cats through dream logic. Last Love wonders how devotion can sit alongside uncertainty. Farmhouse folds shared memories into an apology. These songs live in the middle of things, where the past still feels present, and the present already feels like memory.
The recording process keeps that closeness intact. Harmer tracked the album live off the floor in living rooms and backyard garages with collaborators Dylan Burchell, Julian Psihogios, Ben Whiteley, Oliver LaMantia, Jasper Smith, Gavin Gardiner and Matt Kelly. You catch the creak of a chair, the air between instruments. It’s the sound of friends making music somewhere they feel at ease.
What makes the record stick isn’t just her voice, though that’s the thing you notice first, unforced, direct, warm. It’s the way the band and the songs feel inseparable. There’s no sense of parts being bolted together. Everything moves in step, even when it drifts.
Genre doesn’t box this one in either. There’s some country dust in Farmhouse, a touch of jazz phrasing in Little Light, a gentle indie-rock push in Take It On. None of it feels like a stylistic flex, more like the natural undercurrents of players who bring their own languages into the room.
Her writing has shifted since Stay In Touch. That record looked inward, often describing moments as they happened. Eye of the Storm spends more time with what those moments leave behind. Slow Down wanders through her mother’s childhood, noticing what’s stayed the same. Time to Move On doesn’t wrap things up neatly; it just opens the door to whatever’s next.
There’s a patience here that feels earned. Harmer lets a melody take its time. She circles back to a line if it needs another pass. She trusts a single chord change to do the heavy lifting. And she trusts the listener enough not to rush the reveal.
By the time Memory Lullaby drifts out, it’s like you’ve been sitting through an unhurried late-night exchange where no one’s watching the clock and the pauses matter as much as the words.
Stay In Touch caught Harmer finding her footing; Eye of the Storm shows her planted, looking out with a steadier view. It’s a record built on connection to her people, her craft, and whatever quiet truth she’s chasing next.
Eye of the Storm is out on August 15 via Arts & Crafts
Georgia Harmer plays Casa Del Popolo on November 6. BUY TICKETS
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