Like I Used To

Opening with the powerful, urgent drumming of ‘Red Face’ before segueing into the first single she ever released, ‘Middle Of The Bed’, ‘Like I Used To’ is the result of almost five years of open mic nights and tireless touring both as a vocalist for Bombay Bicycle Club and as an artist in her own right. It’s an astonishingly accomplished record for a singer who turned 23 the night she concluded her UK headline tour at London’s Heaven, one of those rare debut albums where every song deserves to be there. The unconventionally structured, tempo-hopping ‘Lines’, with its complex time signatures and roaring choruses; the slide guitars and Sufjan-esque harmonies of ‘Shiver’; the brooding, atmospheric ‘Place’ - the entire album is testament to Lucy’s desire to produce as organic a record as possible. For an artist described by The Fly as “disarmingly candid”, recording was never going to happen in a sterile inner-city studio, with Lucy instead choosing to lay down the tracks at her parent’s house and the village hall in her native Warwickshire with the aid of her band mates and producer extraordinaire Charlie Hugall.