Lizzie Thomas – Awakening (2025)
From the very first track, what strikes the listener is Thomas’s voice, an instrument as supple as it is commanding. At times, it drapes itself in the velvet smoke of the great jazz vocalists she clearly reveres. At other moments, it opens raw and unguarded, charged with soul, as if her own heartbeat were rising through each note. This duality is what gives Awakening its pulse: a seamless weaving of elegance and grit, restraint and release.
The album’s centrepiece, ‘This Love’, brims with a kind of conviction that can only be sung by someone who has walked through self-doubt and emerged into self-acceptance. Thomas’s declaration of self-love rings not just as personal truth but as a collective mantra, a gift she offers to her listeners. The title track, ‘Awakening’, moves differently; it draws us inward, with a hypnotic cycle of fifths that turns like a slow, spiralling staircase, each repetition leading us deeper into reverie. The song does not demand attention so much as it casts a spell, and we surrender willingly.
Other moments shine just as brightly. ‘Magnificent’ is a hymn of gratitude, a luminous ode to the cycles of life, sung with both awe and serenity. ‘Home’ aches in quieter tones, a remembrance of Thomas’s late mother that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant. And then there is ‘This Fire’, a track that refuses stillness, alive with urgency and flame, urging the listener to move, to act, to feel.
The arrangements across Awakening are lush yet never overburdened, textured but never cluttered. The Grammy-winning Harlem String Quartet threads its way through the record like light through stained glass, sometimes expansive, sometimes intimate, always perfectly placed. The electric bass and the warm currents of the B3 Hammond organ root the songs with a contemporary pulse, giving the music breadth and immediacy. It is a sound that gently steps away from the well-trodden path of the Great American Songbook without abandoning the richness and detail that make jazz so beloved.
Thomas has the rare ability to write music that is at once deeply personal and quietly universal. Much of the album, she has shared, was born from dreams, meditation, and stillness, and that intuitive process is audible in every phrase. The songs feel less constructed than revealed, as though they surfaced from within her, fully formed and waiting.
What lingers after listening is not a sense of genre, but of journey. Awakening is less a style than a map, charting where Thomas has been and illuminating where she is headed. Bold and tender, spiritual and sensual, it is an album that introduces Lizzie Thomas not only as a world-class vocalist, but as a composer and producer in complete command of her craft.
Find out more about Lizzie Thomas on her official website, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Spotify.
