Laura Marling Semper Femina
Album stream , Mar 10, 2017

"Her steady output has produced some of her generation’s finest records, and her sixth, Semper Femina, is among her most affecting to date."

100 % The A.V. Club

"while Silent Movie felt like a minor departure, this record still manages to sound deeply connected to its predecessors."

100 % musicOMH.com

"It all adds up to the most serene, stylistically varied album Marling has ever created."

100 % New Musical Express (NME)

"When pondering gets this skilled, and this fruitful, the dividends far outweigh the misgivings."

100 % The Independent (UK)

"While Marling's lyrics come across as powerful and worldly, it's the conversational tone that makes Semper Femina work so well."

90 % No Ripcord

"With Eagle already standing as one of the peaks of modern folk music, we would not necessarily have expected to hear another knockout record from her, but there’s no denying Semper Femina stands toe-to-toe with her opus."

90 % The 405

"Semper Femina matches Laura Marling’s personal quest to unlock facets of her identity echoing with the wider struggle to clear a space for the feminine voice within society itself. With a triumphant new album it seems that this songwriter has found a room of her own."

90 % Clash Music

"he has created an album of songs whose sounds and sentiments are much weightier than they appear on the surface, providing entry to somewhere much more wondrous and strange and troubling than it first appears. Semper Femina is a ticket for such a journey, one that provides practical insights but no easy answers."

90 % Paste Magazine

"Semper Femina does not reach the soaring intensity and edged elation of Once I Was an Eagle, nor does it carry almost any of the freaked-out electricity that propelled Short Movie and allowed it to stand as a worthy successor to Eagle. But it is a strong, elegant, and self-assured album that, in its creative arrangements and lyrical world building, contains remarkable complexity and depth in terms of both skill and concept."

83 % Consequence of Sound

"It is another gem in an already glittering canon."

80 % The Telegraph (UK)

"Marling wanders and wonders what it’s all about. Her journey enriches us all."

80 % PopMatters

"In all, Semper Femina is powerful display of Marling's craft and, the album's driving force, love."

80 % Under The Radar

"There’s a new slinkiness to some of these songs."

80 % The Observer (UK)

"Laura Marling crafts yet another hard-to-pin, experimental, statement. A shape-shifting artist who never pauses, the record patters quietly away in a flurry of footsteps and birdsong, as the elusive morning finally arrives."

80 % DIY Magazine

"There's always more to Marling than the uninitiated might hear at first, and Semper Femina is yet another astounding testament to her talent and the multitudes therein."

80 % Exclaim

"Having entered the limelight early, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter has now settled into a comfortable groove to on this finely honed career highlight."

80 % AllMusic

"It’s her attempt to understand femininity, and that occurs here in poetic and often quite abstract fashion. Evidently, for Marling, femininity is less fickle and changeable than mesmerisingly mysterious."

80 % Drowned In Sound

"You’re not struck by a sense of dry conceptualising, more her way with a smart, witty lyric."

80 % The Guardian

"Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity."

80 % The New York Times

"Semper Femina is a concise, dynamic statement from the English singer-songwriter, mixing breezy 70’s country-rock melodies with claustrophobic, fingerpicking folk, often on the same song."

80 % American Songwriter

"Even though it’s a short record in terms of both duration and the number of tracks, this is very much a kaleidoscopic work, examining what it is to be a woman from a variety of cleverly-realised access points."

80 % The Line of Best Fit

"Semper Femina continues her decade-long hot streak with another collection of finely wrought vignettes on love, loss, and the empowerment that can be found in both."

80 % The Skinny

"With Semper Femina, Marling is back on more assured ground, largely acoustic, with subtle arrangements and an exquisite use of strings that seem a natural, wholly fitting addition to her ever-expanding palette."

80 % Record Collector

"Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women."

77 % Pitchfork

"Her own voice just grows stronger, literally and figuratively: On "Wild Fire," advising a lover or frenemy to "stop playing that shit out on me," she's a wordy folk-soul queen of entirely her own making."

70 % Rolling Stone

"The result is an album that seeks to push folk's innate naturalism into an even more progressive space, eschewing any trace of outmoded roles and stereotypes. In doing so, Semper Femina never feels strained or disingenuous, the effortless antithesis to the studied, conservative posing of so much modern folk."

70 % Slant Magazine

"The lack of anything that’s decidedly uptempo may be a detriment to some, but the blend of strings and acoustic instrumentation more than compensates for the subdued stance."

60 % Blurt Magazine