Atanaria
After facing a near-death experience in 2022, Shannon Wright believed her journey in music was over. Yet in 2025, she returns with Reservoir of Love, her eleventh studio album—an intensely personal, grief-stricken, yet profoundly moving work. Dedicated to the late producer Steve Albini and Philippe Couderc of Vicious Circle, both of whom were instrumental in her career, this album is a reservoir not just of love, but of sorrow, resilience, and catharsis.
From the opening notes of the title track, where a delicate music box intro is swallowed by heavy, distorted guitars, the tone is set—pain is omnipresent, but so is transformation. The Hits offers a brief respite with its soft arpeggios and choral harmonies, yet Wright’s voice remains laced with tragedy. Tracks like Weight of The Sun and Ballad of A Heist lean into darkness, with somber guitars and a voice that shifts between whispers and eruptions of raw emotion. Meanwhile, Countless Days mesmerizes with its hypnotic keyboard melody and delicate strings, carrying a bittersweet beauty.
Wright’s ability to craft contrast is striking. Mountains feels lighter, buoyed by a steady bassline, while Shadows, dedicated to Couderc, is breathtakingly poignant with its evocative strings. But it is Something Borrowed, a piano-driven farewell to Albini, that stands as the album’s most transcendent moment—a voice emerging from the depths of grief, proving that music is eternal, that those we lose are never truly gone.
With Reservoir of Love, Shannon Wright turns pain into art, grief into sound. It is not an easy listen, but it is an essential one—an album that finds hope in the wreckage, where every note pulses with the weight of survival and remembrance.
