REVIEW: Alex McCulloch – ‘Alex McCulloch’

There’s something disarmingly earnest about Alex McCulloch’s new self-titled collection,, a sense that she’s not just writing about friendship, grief, and love, but actively living through them in real time. ‘Alex McCulloch’ is a scrapbook of emotional truths: scrawled margins, Polaroid tears, voice memos from the heart’s ungovernable borderlands.

Opening with ‘Empty House’, McCulloch plunges into familiar territory, gatherings that feel hollow, smiles that don’t quite fit, memories that haunt more than they heal. Her lyrics are plainspoken and piercing: “your mouth is an iceberg and I’m in the way” lands like a punch dressed in poetry. It’s a snapshot of social anxiety wrapped in melancholic wit, and it sets the tone for a record that dances with both ghosts and grace.

Tracks like ‘Angel’ shimmer with vulnerability, the kind that makes you ache for the nerve it took to write them. “Stay here, Madeline,” she pleads, the line echoing like a late-night voicemail never sent. There’s intimacy here, but also a self-awareness that pulls the song back from sentimentality into something braver.

One of the standout moments comes in ‘Lidstoner’, McCulloch’s open letter to Canadian icon Gord Downie. Comparing Gord’s lyricism to Gretzky’s assist record might seem cheeky, but it reveals a deep reverence for the power of words to carry us through.

Musically, the EP blends lo-fi charm with folk-rock textures and a rotating cast of collaborators who never distract from McCulloch’s voicee. From the playful ‘Silver Spoon’ to the aching nostalgia of ‘Gregory’, each song feels lived-in, like a secondhand jacket that still smells like the last heartbreak it witnessed.

McCulloch is at her most potent when she blurs the line between self-deprecation and sincerity. “I don’t need amphetamines—I’m just like this,” she sings on ‘Drum Circle’, a song that somehow turns jealousy, longing, and late-night weed-fuelled realisations into a kind of emotional jazz solo.

‘Alex McCulloch’ is the sound of a songwriter opening old wounds just to see what light comes in. It’s funny and raw and uncomfortably relatable, a collection about being too much and never enough, about love that lingers and friends who never really leave, even when they’re gone.

To borrow a sentiment from the artist herself: it’s not always polished, but it’s real, and that’s exactly what makes it beautiful.