Wanderlust is the sound of a life packed into a suitcase and shaken across borders until it glows. Scottish-based artist LUISA, a classically trained pianist, producer, and military spouse, spent 2019–2025 living in Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Albania.
Instead of just collecting photos, she collected sounds from street music, storms, protests, birds, and bells. On Wanderlust, she folds those field recordings into folk colours and electronica, turning her years overseas into a kind of moving sound-map. It’s already turning heads, too, drawing praise from Marvel composer Guy Michelmore and landing on the shortlist for a major production award.
The album opens with “Heart,” and you can feel the thesis right away. The song has a rumbling, crunchy, crumbling texture over which soothing music comes and plays dreamily. Then the music expands and shimmers, sparkling. The music and the rhythm form a dance and conversation that swirls around each other. Strings swell amidst them. Then an ethereal voice comes mesmerizingly vocalizing in the ambient haze, in the bridge. The dance resumes. It’s dreamy and lively, like frolicking of fae, but also like a collage of everywhere she’s been.
Elsewhere, each track becomes a postcard from a different chapter. “Spring” remembers Ukraine before evacuation, all soft light and unbroken mornings. “Enchant” threads polyphonic chant and Georgian drum patterns into a gentle trance. “Distance” traces the ache of living in a foreign land, its melody echoing Slavic pipes heard in a smoky bar in Belarus. “Isolate” captures the hush of closed borders, while “Rise” surges with the raw charge of crowds recorded during the Minsk uprising. “Storm” crackles with a thunderstorm taped from a Georgian balcony; “Sail” drifts through Greek seas; “Soar” rides clarinets from a Tirana street into the sky.
By the time the stripped-back “Heart (Piano)” closes things out, Wanderlust feels less like a travel log and more like memory itself: layered, haunted, tender, and always on the move.
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Review by: Naomi Joan