Lady Like

Nominally a country artist -- shes signed to Warner Nashville and has written with Sam Hunt, her first single More Hearts Than Mine cracked the Billboard Country Airplay Top 10 in 2019 -- Ingrid Andress doesnt follow the conventional contours of the genre on her 2020 debut, Lady Like. Largely comprised of songs released as digital singles and EPs over the course of 2019 (just three tracks make their debut here), Lady Like does indeed feel like music designed to be played on streaming services: its bright, glossy, and amorphous, shifting styles from verse to chorus. Often, music this multipurpose feels rootless and overcooked, but Andress is a slyly powerful singer and a sharp songwriter and slyly powerful singer, so the country-pop hybrids on Lady Like seem like a reflection of her personality, not calculated. Andress favors aural melodrama, opting for sweeping choruses and cavernous arrangements, a trait thats balanced by her knack for intimate lyrical details. She deftly draws a portrait of her parents on More Hearts Than Mine, unspools a series of poor decisions on Bad Advice, and makes a persuasive case that the relationship on Were Not Friends isnt anything but a romance. These vivid tales hearken back to country tradition but Lady Like doesnt take the genres conventions to heart; if its a throwback to anything, its the overly shiny pop albums of Y2K. Unlike Sam Hunt, who consciously expanded countrys borders with his hip-hop-R&B fusions, Andress isnt working within a chosen genre, shes making music that defies easy categorization. Lady Like is thick with appealing contradictions -- its grandiose yet intimate, sincere yet cinematic, slick but soulful -- and to be that dense and accessible within the course of a mere eight songs is something of an achievement, especially for a debut album. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine