There’s something quietly thrilling about hearing from artists who’ve, for a time, seemed in retreat from our daily ears. The news that Sade is releasing a solo single again—her new song “Young Lion”—already gallops with significance. And if that weren’t enough, Laura Marling and Rosie Lowe are also in motion, offering new music that feels both deeply personal and reflective of their present selves. In what follows, I want to track what’s going on with each of them—not in rigid biographical chronology, but as a kind of emotional and creative unfolding, side by side.
Sade’s “Young Lion” comes after a long silence. In fact, it is her first new original song (outside of soundtrack work) since 2018, when she released “Flower of the Universe” and “The Big Unknown.” In launching this track, she isn’t merely returning for nostalgia’s sake—she is offering a message, a reconciliation, a reckoning with love, identity, motherhood, and time. The single is part of Transa (styled TRAИƧA), a benefit compilation from the Red Hot Organization, devoted to transgender awareness and creative expression. Sade’s contribution is not tangential—it is central, intimate, and deeply rooted: it is a dedication to her son, Izaak, who is a trans man
“Young Lion” is spare, deliberate. The arrangement slips back so as not to intrude—soft piano keys, gentle strings, minimal percussion—and leaves space for Sade’s voice, for the words to land.Its lyricism has the confessional air of a letter, with lines like, “Young man / It’s been so heavy for you / You must have felt so alone / The anguish and pain / I should’ve known.” The video is even more revealing: stitched together from home footage spanning decades, it shows Sade and Izaak in tender, everyday moments—cradling, walking, embracing on a beach—overlaying physical time with emotional time. (BET) It is rare for Sade to offer anything so personal, so unveiled. Because one of her signatures has always been elegance married to reserve, here that reserve is breached, and we see the permission she gives, first to herself, to love, to regret, to heal.
Critics and listeners alike have felt the weight of this return. The song is co-written by Sade, Aaron Taylor Dean, and Ben Travers, and the production is intentional in its restraint. The Red Hot project divides its 46 songs into chapters meant to map spiritual and emotional arcs; “Young Lion” sits at a point of personal reckoning, of healing One press commentary framed the project as one of turning grief into possibility, of vision grounded in care—values that resonate powerfully with the single’s tone Sade’s voice returns not as an exclamation but as a witness, as a mother’s soft reckoning with love, regret, and acceptance.
Parallel to Sade’s emotional return is Laura Marling, whose new album Patterns in Repeat offers something quieter but just as necessary. Patterns in Repeat is Marling’s eighth studio album, released October 25, 2024, and it arrives after four years since Song for Our Daughter The album was written in the months following the birth of her daughter (in 2023), recorded largely at her home studio, and co-produced with Dom Monks. From the outset, the work is tethered to home: Patterns in Repeat opens with domestic sounds, with voices, baby coos, partly to situate us in the interior life Marling is exploring.
On this record, Marling strips back. There is no percussion; strings are light, voices hushed, production unadorned. The tilt is toward the inner world: motherhood, memory, the webs we inherit. “Child of Mine,” the opening track, is a lullaby, a promise, a doorway. “Patterns,” the lead single, muses on recurring cycles of life and love. (NME) Elsewhere, “Looking Back” is a tribute to her father—the album includes a song he wrote decades ago, now reframed through her voice.
Critics have responded with warm acclaim. On Metacritic, Patterns in Repeat earned a weighted score of 91, indicating “universal acclaim.” Pitchfork’s review emphasizes how Marling’s voice never quite opens up fully, how the restraint is itself expressive: “swelling strings, yes, but no percussion … the songs are marked by a homey quietness.” The Guardian interprets the album as a tender love letter to motherhood without slipping into sentimentality, commending how weighty themes—heritage, time, repetition—are held in small, delicate turns MOJO praised the pacing and candor, seeing the album as a document of Marling in process as both artist and parent. (Mojo) Other reviews highlight how the songs feel lived-in: moments of domestic chatter, strings that bloom but don’t overtake, and lyrics that lean into collapse and continuity. The Independent called it an “audio motherhood narrative,” one that quietly pivots away from overt emoting into reflective restraint. In short, Patterns in Repeat is a marital pact between vulnerability and form: it doesn’t flood with emotion, but it opens the space for feeling in its hushed pauses.
Then there is Rosie Lowe, who may not carry the same public weight as Sade or Marling, but whose musical gestures feel freshly curious. Lowe’s new single, “Gratitudes,” arrives as part of her build-up to Lover, Other, slated for release August 16, 2024 (via Blue Flowers)The track is delicate and layered: airy voice, intricate percussion, soulful harmonies, an undercurrent of dreaminess. As Lowe herself states, the song is her ode to her morning ritual of gratitude—a reminder she writes to anchor her mind when it drifts. She explains that the beat was laid down in Berlin with producer D’Monk, on his MPC, in limited time: “we made it … in 15 minutes just before leaving the studio.” The result is not rough, but alive—intimate in spirit, with textures that breathe rather than assert.
“Gratitudes” doesn’t dramatize; it accumulates. It listens more than it demands. Its gestures echo more than they declare. In this way it sits well in the same atmosphere as Marling’s quieter album, though the edge is different: Lowe is negotiating gratitude, self-reminding, connection in the quiet, rather than the seismic repair Sade demands or the maternal interior that Marling navigates.
Taken together, these three musical gestures—Sade’s reclamation, Marling’s reflection, Lowe’s quiet invocation—form a kind of harmonic arc of return, reckoning, and reengagement. Sade returns from silence not to reclaim past status but to make a message. Marling doesn’t seek to recreate earlier eras of folk expansiveness; she turns inward. Lowe refuses the loud and brash; she lets gratitude speak in whispers. Their modes differ, but the impulse is similar: to carry forward, not by grand gestures, but by reattuning—to relationships, to self, to time itself.
What’s fascinating is how “Young Lion,” Patterns in Repeat, and “Gratitudes” all point toward the creative value of boundaries and silence. Sade gives us fewer instruments to feel more weight. Marling removes drums to let strings and voice speak. Lowe works with minimal space to let gratitude settle. This is not a retreat from ambition; it is ambition reconfigured. To make a song less about filling space than about inhabiting it.
One can imagine that these artists—at different phases, with different footprints—are reconciling their internal worlds with their public ones. Sade, the icon, allowing a deeply personal moment to be visible. Marling, the once-guarded songwriter, allowing motherhood to permeate the vessel of her songwriting. Lowe, the contemporary experimenter, allowing emotional routines (gratitude) to become art.
It also underscores how music still thrives in the margins, in the quiet wells of the heart. In a world where loudness is often conflated with significance, these artists remind us that sometimes the true breakthrough lies in what is held back, in what is felt, in what is simply allowed to exist. And because each comes from a space of honesty rather than performance, their returns—or continuations—feel less like resurrections than evolutions.
If you like, I can pull out a few songs from each of these (for example, highlight a track from Marling you might start with, or a moment from “Young Lion” to sit with). Would you want me to pick out some listening suggestions or do a close lyric reading?
