Lily Seabird: mourning in advance

Lightspheres on Their Way is the record where Lily Seabird stops writing goodbyes and starts waiting for one. Nine songs, forty-seven minutes, and a harmonium that opens the thing and returns at the end, like someone walking back into a room they already left. It is her third album in three years, the heaviest of the three, and the first where she stands in the dark instead of picking it up and setting it down.

Seabird grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and moved to Burlington, Vermont at 20, after two years at The New School wore her down. She finished her degree at the University of Vermont, spent time as a Climate and Energy Fellow at the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, and released a first EP, Beside Myself, in 2021. Then came Alas in 2024 and Trash Mountain in 2025, both of them circling loss, the second named for the corner of Burlington she shares with a house full of other musicians. She records for Lame-O Records. The new album stays on the same subject and presses down on it.

Lightspheres was made in Burlington with Garrett Linck, who engineered, mixed and produced it with Seabird. Amar Lal mastered it, Samantha Caballero handled the layout, and the vinyl runs through Lame-O and Macro Sound. "Election Day" came out as the lead single in June, and the album followed on October 2. Nine tracks, no interludes, nothing to hide behind.

The opening stretch states the case and takes its time doing it. "The Pulley" puts a harmonium over everything, thin and wet, and underneath it she asks the question the record keeps circling: whether prayer survives the loss of belief. It is a room more than a hook, and she stays in it until the air is used up.

"Pennsy" is the winter one, a lament about going home to a town that will not be as dramatic as memory wants it to be. She wishes the place carried the ghosts the movies promise, so she could switch them off. Then "Portal to the Past," the longest song here at just over seven minutes, and the best. A guitar sways drunkenly and alone while she counts what the years have taken: the lines on her hands, the marching band that fades, the dull roar of booze and cocaine that replaces it. A rocker from rock bottom, sung from the end of a pint.

"Blackstar" is the odd one, dust and dread built around a rock show happening just before everything ends. It is the record's one piece of black comedy, and it works because she plays it straight. "Slipswitch" and "The Afterglow" carry the back half, and then the title track, which is where the whole thing pays off. The harmonium comes back. She rehearses a loss she has not had yet, repeating "I'll be alright" until the phrase wears through and turns into something else: a small trembling sphere of light, held up because there is nothing else to hold.

This is for the people who keep Jason Molina's later records within reach and know exactly why, and for anyone who has ever wanted Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand" to keep swaying past the fade. It is slow, it asks for an evening, and the second play gives more than the first, which is the honest way around.

What does not work is the patience itself. "Portal to the Past" earns its seven minutes and then spends the last of them repeating a sway you already know, and the record holds grief at one temperature for forty-seven minutes, which leaves the closing pair to deliver the relief and the ending at once. It manages, though not every record would.

Lightspheres on Their Way is a 4.5 because of what it refuses: no uplift, no turn toward the light that costs nothing, no song where the harmonium fixes anything. Seabird has written farewells before. This is the first one where the goodbye arrives before the person does.

The tracklist

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