Cape Town singer-songwriter Esspi has spent six years making ‘FAUXstalgia’, an album whose title comes from a word she invented to describe something strangely familiar: mourning a time you never actually lived through.
The project of Sarah Pearson, Esspi reaches backwards musically too, pulling from the production of the ’70s and ’80s and artists including Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, Linda Ronstadt, Queen and The Eagles. But ‘FAUXstalgia’ isn’t interested in becoming a period piece. Those influences are dragged into her own mix of folk-pop, alt-pop and indie-country, with plenty of modern pop instinct still intact.
Some of these songs have travelled a long way to get here. Esspi began writing the album at 13, hoarding ideas and voice memos across successive phones before recording with producer David Jones during school holidays. The sessions became a playground for experimentation, complete with endless handclaps, Pro Tools crashes and stray studio sounds that survived long enough to make the final mixes.
At the centre is ‘Retrograde’, a song about being the person expected to hold everything together while quietly moving backwards yourself. It captures the album’s wider shift away from the isolation of earlier single ‘Tainted Heart’, turning those late-night spirals into something Esspi can confront rather than conceal.
