my own fairytale: Klein scores a dark Disney film nobody shot

Klein's new album appeared on September 28 with no notice: twelve tracks, mostly instrumental, and the singing held back until the second half. my own fairytale is a composer's record in the plainest sense, strings at full weight, noise guitar carried over from sleep with a cane, and a voice that arrives like a late guest entering a room mid-argument. The orchestra is the loudest presence here.

Klein is a London composer and vocalist whose catalogue runs back to 2016 and refuses to settle anywhere. Only came first, then CC, Lifetime, Frozen, Harmattan, Star in the Hood, touched by an angel, marked, and two records in 2025: sleep with a cane, a UK rap record recast as an ambient folklore tape, and thirteen sense. Earlier this year she released a stream of singles, some of which reappear here, plus Turn Up, a joint EP with Mica Levi that only exists on YouTube. She puts work out faster than most artists finish arguing about a mix, and each release answers the question of what her music is for in a different way.

my own fairytale comes through her own label, Parkwuud Entertainment, distributed by Roc Nation. The label's one line for it is a take on a dark Disney soundtrack, and that framing does work before you press play. It is built to be heard in the dark at volume by someone who wants the strings to be the frightening part.

The palette is spectral ambient with a classical spine and a noise habit. The string writing sits high and close, nearer to score cues than songs, and the guitar from sleep with a cane keeps doing the damage the orchestra is too well behaved to do. Grime and R&B show up in the low end and in the way several of these pieces refuse to resolve. The voice breaks through only in the back half, which turns the opening stretch into a held breath.

The release points at two of the twelve. Man in the Mirror is the ghostly one and the one with a video, built on atmosphere rather than a hook, the kind of track that works by refusing to announce itself. Siren Reloaded is the set piece, co-written and arranged by the violinist and composer Sasha Scott for the London Sinfonietta. The rest of the album drifts; this one makes an argument.

There is a subject underneath the instrumentation, and not a small one: a double life, a family that does not know about the musical career, the want to connect with them and with herself, and the running question of how she reads her own gender and fits into a society that would rather she did not ask. Almost none of that is said out loud. When the voice does arrive, it lands as pressure released.

This is for the ambient and modern classical shelves, and for anyone who keeps sleep with a cane and thirteen sense within reach, or who thinks a record can be a score with no screen attached. If you want choruses, there is nothing here for you, and the London Sinfonietta credit will not change that.

What does not work is the patience it demands before the payoff. A mostly instrumental record asks a lot of a listener's attention, and the first half leans on texture where a decision would do more; a couple of pieces fade out having made their point once too often. Siren Reloaded carries the heaviest arrangement here, and that is where the seam shows, the orchestral writing pressing so hard that the noise set against it has to fight for room.

The best of it happens where those two forces meet and the voice settles the question. It is a fairytale with the narrator kept offstage until the last act, and the withholding is what makes the arrival land. Four, and the number is argued by Siren Reloaded and by the half of the record where Klein finally opens her mouth.

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