Eight solo albums into Laura Marling‘s career, one would be tempted to describe Patterns in Reat using a lot of the same adjectives that have long defined her songwriting: intimate, stunning, sincere. To celebrate Patterns in Repeat on those terms might also be a way to make up for lost time – the record marks the longest wait between new material since the 34-year-old first put out music as a new adult – especially considering that 2021’s Animal, her second collaborative album with Mike Lindsey under the name LUMP, marked another stylistic departure. (“It felt like getting the feeling back of making the first album you’ve ever made,” Lindsay said at the time.) But while Patterns in Repeat falls spiritually in line with 2020’s Song for Our Daughter and a lot of Marling’s past output, we’ve never heard her quite so unadorned and unguarded, her heart both lightened and moved by the confines of familiar spaces. Intimate, gorgeous, all that still is true – but it’s also tangibly her homeliest and most lived-in record to date.
The lived-in aspect is obvious: in contrast to Song for Our Daughter, which was addressed to and revolved around a fictional daughter, Patterns in Repeat was written after the birth of her daughter in 2023. Indeed, Marling often had her daughter beside her as she crafted these songs, turning her living room into a recording studio and rendering them like stolen moments in the everyday; the intimacy is ever-present, just sneaking in with each take. You don’t need a reviewer to tell you, though: a baby cooing is among the first sounds we hear on the opening track, ‘Child of Mine’, and the lyrics are descriptively autobiographical: “You and your dad are dancing in the kitchen/ Life is slowing down but itʼs still bitchin’.”
Producer Dom Monks suggested – “argued,” per press materials – to properly re-record the tracks in his studio, but Marling wanted to preserve the raw material. She wasn’t, however, against fleshing them out in ways that not only beautify but animate the subtleties of – and subtle differences between – these songs, like the backing vocals that make ‘Child of Mine’ ever so tender. With Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story score as a reference, Marling handed the recordings to Rob Moose, whose string arrangements cradle ‘No One’s Going To Love You Like I Can’ with a firmness the piano can barely reach as she delivers the line, “If life is just a dream/ Iʼm gonna make it mean something worth a damn.” And Monks works his magic on songs like ‘Your Girl’, which haunts and quivers in its closeness, balancing each new sound that unfurls and cutting it somewhere between the naked feeling of aloneness and eternal connection. The vocal effects clouding the word “abstract” on ‘Patterns’ is another brilliant touch.
The album’s production and arrangement ultimately befit its subject matter: Patterns in Repeat may begin with the first song Marling wrote after her daughter’s birth, anchoring us in the present, but once her new reality sinks in, she wanders further off. And the more she veers beyond, but always around, the record’s domestic framing, the more she can stretch its sonic palette. The middle of the album in particular sees Marling slipping into the deeper recesses of memory, tending to the quiet and uncharacteristically ominous mourning of ‘The Shadows’, perhaps one of her most striking compositions. It’s followed by the instrumental ‘Interlude (Time Passages)’, which links Marling’s clear-eyed meditations with the strange dreamworld she invokes with LUMP. Then she turns to tunes rooted in a time she hardly or couldn’t possibly remember: with ‘Looking Back’, she tackles a song her father wrote in the ’70s, her hushed vocals keeping its unabashed nostalgia at bay, while ‘Caroline’ tells a story out of a half-remembered chorus. The lullaby that closes off the album, too, feels timeless.
So while Patterns in Repeat is fully immersed in and awed by the world of new parenthood, its tidal shifts and simple rhythms, it grows all the more fascinated by its relationship with the past; the ways family, lineage, and longing penetrate the domestic sphere. Looking back and beyond autobiography is how Marling delineates the titular patterns, but it’s also how she contemplates her own place, not just as a mother, but as a songwriter – two roles often presumed to be conflicting. On ‘Song for Our Daughter’, she sang, “Lately I’ve been thinking/ About our daughter growing old/ All of the bullshit that she might be told”; now, she affirms, “But Iʼve spoken to the angels who protect you/ Because youʼre mine, they cast their golden light across this child.” Marling threads her creative output through Patterns in Repeat, too, even repurposing a string passage from Once I Was an Eagle to wind down the title track. All the way back in 2011’s ‘Don’t Ask Me Why’, she sang, “I was thrown and blown and tossed and turned until/ Time found its hand and called an end.” Time still has the same power, she realizes, but the relief comes in its circular nature, the interminable now feeding into history. “Long nights, fast years, so they say,” she sighs at the beginning of the album, then weaves them all into one.
