Alice Barlow: a garden, a guitar, and the world outside it
One guitar, one voice, one South London garden. Barlow's third single of the year is about loving the world and refusing to look at what is done to it.
BY JOLT Staff · SEP 24 2026 · 1 min readGarden is Alice Barlow, a guitar, her own voice, and not much else. Self-produced at home, out now on Domino, her third single this year after Behind and In A Vice: four minutes and twenty-three seconds with no padding.
The voice has been public since she was a teenager. Barlow grew up in Macclesfield, played Rae Wilson in Hollyoaks from 2009 to 2011, reached the battle rounds of The Voice UK in 2013 and lost to Andrea Begley, then kept working: Benidorm, a BBC comedy in 2023. She now writes and produces out of South London.
“It’s a collage of old family videos from the 60s, 90s and early 2000s shot by various members of my family. It’s a reflection on life, nature and all that comes with it.”
She made this one in her own garden a couple of summers ago, guitars and voice, and calls the process cathartic: it "became a vessel to process a lot of those feelings." The video is hers too, a collage of family footage from the 60s, 90s and early 2000s.
What it processes is named plainly. Barlow says the song is about her love for nature and the collective denial of climate change, genocide and war, and about the dissonance of walking the dog or remembering a dream while all of that continues. That gap between the small and the unbearable is the record, and she leaves it open.
For the listener with a shelf of one-voice records who wants stakes in the words this time. Play it on headphones, walking, with a window open. It is not built for a room full of people.
The flaw is the size of the ask. A guitar and a voice have to carry a war and a dog walk inside four minutes, and the daily detail can read as retreat where it is meant to be counterweight.
Garden holds most of it, and the nerve is the reason. A 4: modest means, an immodest subject, one frame.
