The British singer-songwriter Hayden Thorpe released “Diviner” in late February 2019, just a year after the final performance of his band Wild Beasts. From its stark opening chords and breathy first line—“I’m a keeper of secrets, pray do tell”—the song sounded markedly personal. With little more than his stately countertenor and humble piano, Thorpe harnessed the energy of quiet solitude and proceeded to pitch that emotion skyward until the music felt bathed in a dim light. After more than a decade with Wild Beasts, “Diviner” pointed to a different direction for Thorpe.
That eponymous single opens Thorpe’s debut solo album, which is fitting not just because it was the first song he wrote after Wild Beasts announced their split; it is the central thesis and shining example of his solo music. This 10-song collection was written largely at home on his own piano, which he’s referred to as a “totem.” But you could also think of the instrument as his anchor.
Diviner is wholly rooted in stripped-down songwriting and reverent hush; its tonal range is decidedly limited. Thorpe and producer/collaborator Leo Abrahams do flesh out some of the piano pieces with muted guitar, drums, and electronics, in an attempt to break Diviner out of its two dimensions: “Straight Lines” adds an understated funk to what’s essentially an elegy for the inevitable end of all relationships. But the layering of contrasts doesn’t always work. Songs like “Earthly Needs” and “Love Crimes” varnish Thorpe’s piano with the kind of disco-pop patina that marked 2016’s Boy King, yet there’s nothing quite so brash or ornate here, so instead we get what sounds like a hopelessly introspective Boy George singing about “emotional jujitsu” and “living a life of love crime.” Chalk it up to the pitfalls of unabashedly baring one’s interior life while writing a pop album.
Thorpe makes up for his more dubious sojourns when he lets his anchor steady him. The second half of Diviner ditches the opening half’s attempts at levity and delivers some of the record’s most impactful music. The conviction of “In My Name” is audible in its ringing chords and whispers. His unusually expressive vocal melody brings depth to “Anywhen,” while the piano suggests the rippling pulse of a Nils Frahm performance. Such standouts aren’t entirely devoid of their own small shortcomings, like the awkward line, “Now when I think of us, I pretty much self combust.” But there’s a charm to these lyrics that’s distinctly Thorpe’s; even a loaded word like “collusion,” sung with a kind of dejected swagger, is freed from its obvious overtones.
Diviner is concerned with the passage of time and reckoning with the past, and parts of it are rooted quite deeply in Thorpe's own history. His 2013 cover of “Goodbye Horses” and Wild Beasts’ Boy King closer “Dreamliner” are early incarnations of the sound he explores here. The idea for a solo album came to him while playing the piano at his father's house, which he'd learned on as a boy; the fluttering ambient piece “Spherical Time” dates back to a composition he started at the age of 16. “A world is waiting for us outside,” Thorpe sings at the album’s end, on “Impossible Object,” as if acknowledging that he’s spent too long cooped up in his head. He has spoken of Diviner as “a self-help album,” and to that end, some of its songs are so intimate that their meanings seem all but impossible for an outsider to parse. But in the moments when he decides to push his music out into the light, Thorpe's self-searching takes on a shape we can all recognize.
