Cape Town singer-songwriter Esspi, the project of Sarah Pearson, has released her debut album "FAUXstalgia," led by focus track "Retrograde," both out now.
The album's title came from a word Esspi coined herself while studying the meaning of nostalgia in college. "I went, wow, that's an emotion I experience every day, but I didn't know it existed," she says. FAUXstalgia, as she defines it, is the feeling of mourning a time you never lived, or deeply understanding an emotion you never personally felt.
Musically, "FAUXstalgia" is a love letter to the production values of the 1970s and 80s, Esspi tracked the record while channelling the mindsets of Kate Bush, Depeche Mode, The Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, and Queen, filtering that era's sound through her own folk-pop, alt-pop, and indie-country lens. The result sits somewhere between the acoustic warmth of America and the confident pop sensibility of Wham!, carrying the emotional honesty of Phoebe Bridgers and Lizzy McAlpine.
The album represents six years of work that began when Esspi was just 13. The first song written for it, "What Am I Supposed To Do," came from watching a close friend's parents go through a divorce, written from the child's perspective. "I wanted to try to imagine what she was feeling and thinking, and how the children always get overlooked in the situation," Esspi says. The rest of the album accumulated gradually, voice memos transferred across phones over the years. "Some songs took ten minutes to write; others took six years."
The album was recorded during school holidays in a home studio with producer David Jones. Saxophonist Dave Bettesworth joined for select sessions, the two Daves becoming known as "Double Daves" in the studio. For "All I Hear Is Rain," Esspi and Jones spent what felt like 500 takes clapping at different volumes and hand shapes in front of a microphone, a sound that ended up buried under the saxophone solo but remained one of her favourite memories from the sessions.
"FAUXstalgia" marks a shift from Esspi's previous single "Tainted Heart," which came from a period of isolation. With this album, she wanted to reframe those same late-night spirals as a source of strength rather than something to hide. "So many people have those two a.m. moments," she says. "I took a bunch of those spiral thoughts and used them as a strength instead."
That reframing sits at the centre of "Retrograde," the album's focus track. The song moves through the exhausting weight of trying to be the strong one while quietly spiralling backward, born from the disappointment of running with the wrong crowd. Looking back now, Esspi says she still thinks about the version of herself who wrote it. "I will always remember the girl writing that song in her two a.m. spiral. Looking at it now, I know I have incredible experience, I've learned so much, and I have so much more knowledge going out into the world."
Elsewhere, "Darkness at the Disco" turns heartbreak into something bittersweet, the realisation that loving someone fiercely sometimes means letting them go, while "What Am I Supposed To Do" remains one of the album's most tender character studies.
With "FAUXstalgia," Esspi turns six years of voice memos, late-night studio delirium, and private battles into a record built to be shared, an album about the emotions we all recognise the moment someone finally names them.
What do you think of Esspi's new release? Let us know in the comments.
