“Where did I leave my soul? Where did I drop that ball?” asks Ella Eyre on her comeback album, Everything, in Time. It has, after all, been 12 years since her husky voice snagged clubbers’ hearts when she guested on Rudimental’s chart-topping “Waiting All Night” (2013) and a decade since the release of her solo debut album, Feline (2015). Although she released the dancehall-inflected single “New Me” in 2020, she last achieved chart success singing on Sigala’s “Came Here for Love” (2017) and “Just Got Paid” (2018).
It appears that, like fellow pop singer Raye, Eyre has really struggled to climb out of the box marked “Dance-Pop Guest Vocalist” into which her major label dropped her. Like Raye, she yearned to express herself on her own terms and so has regrouped and is releasing this music as an independent artist. And if Eyre’s solid, rasping pop-soul record lacks Raye’s original, buttonholing oomph, you can still feel the confidence she feels in stretching out in her own territory.
