Wild Things - CD

People wonder why there's always a massive gap between my albums," says Pip Brown, better known as Ladyhawke, the one-woman synth-pop act from New Zealand. The reason is both complicated and easy. The simple explanation: "I've never released anything I'm not proud of. That's important to me."Those instincts have served Brown well, starting with her self-titled debut in 2008, which peaked at No. 16 on the U.K. album charts and No. 1 in Australia and New Zealand's album charts. Ladyhawke's more aurally angular follow-up, Anxiety, charted in the U.K.'s Top 40 and in Australia's and New Zealand's Top 20, respectively. Brown's conviction to authenticity led her on a journey starting in 2013. Over three years, she scrapped a full Ladyhawkealbum ("The material didn't feel like me. It felt too dark or something"). Once reliant on alcohol to surmount social anxiety ("I'd never done a sober show in my life until last December"), she quit drinking and focused on getting healthy. Then she welcomed that newfound clarity by crafting her latest release, the blissed-out Wild Things. "This album has given me a sense of purpose. Even if it took me months or years to get that purpose, as soon as I finished that record it was like an unbelievable weight was lifted off my shoulders," she says. You can hear that freedom in Wild Things'unabashed exuberance, a powerful, vibrant expression of life itself. "Everything I wrote was all the stuff I was going through. I got it out of my system, exorcised it from my soul.