At just 19, Olive – aka Oh Louise — has made a debut album that feels like opening someone’s bedroom door and finding years of thoughts scattered across the floor. Her debut album “Everything On High” is intimate without feeling overly polished, moving through love, betrayal, loneliness and that strange uncertainty of being young enough to still be figuring yourself out while feeling everything at maximum volume.
Some of these songs date back to 2021, with Oh Louise pulling lyrics directly from her journals and developing them late at night on acoustic guitar or the Civil War-era piano in her family home. That closeness carries into the recording itself. Produced by Oh Louise the album keeps its arrangements rich without burying the person at their centre.
What really got me about the album is how often Oh Louise allows herself to sound uncertain, though, these aren’t songs written from the safe distance of having figured everything out. On opener “Do You Lie To Everyone,” she wants to be understood while admitting she doesn’t quite know how to show somebody what’s happening inside her.
That emotional messiness keeps appearing in different forms. “Lie To Me” knowingly reaches for comforting dishonesty; “After” gets stuck among missed calls, mixed messages and the emotional debris of a relationship that should probably be over; while “Judas” mixes religion, beauty and loneliness into something much bigger and stranger. In fact, there ared are shades of Elliott Smith, Weyes Blood and Judee Sill in the way she pairs direct writing with unexpected melodies and restrained instrumentation, influences Siegel herself counts among her touchstones. By the time “Slip Away” closes the album, leaving everything behind doesn’t suddenly provide some perfect answer. Oh Louise is still unsure where she’s going; she just knows she has to move.
This record that doesn’t pretend growing up happens neatly, as the songs are written across several teenage years sitting beside one another like snapshots of slightly different versions of the same person, and you can almost hear Oh Louise changing between them. For a debut, that’s a pretty special thing to capture, Oh Louise’s debut album isn’t interesting because a 19-year-old sounds unusually mature; it’s interesting because Oh Louise lets being 19 sound complicated, contradictory and unfinished.
