I first stumbled on Rachel Bobbitt through “More” back in 2022, that slow-burn on The Ceiling Could Collapse that hinted at scale without shouting about it. Since then she’s sidestepped the safe option at almost every turn, bending her writing toward sharper edges and stranger colours. Swimming Towards the Sand feels like the moment that restlessness finally exhales. It’s her most cohesive and expansive work to date, a poignant exploration of grief, girlhood, memory, and return that centres itself around how memories and dreams can feel interchangeable until you sit with them long enough to draw distinctions.
Raised in the windswept Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, Bobbitt recorded this album in Los Angeles at Chris Coady’s studio near Glendale’s Verdugo Mountains, a symbolic contrast to the coastal terrain of her hometown. The record was born in transit, written between call centre shifts, hotel rooms, and fleeting homecomings. Working alongside her musical and life partner Justice Der, she plays through a dozen tracks shaped by the East Coast, sinking into memory, floating through loss, and emerging from depths renewed. “The ocean does not care about you at all,” she says. “That’s what makes something truly awesome. It could and will exist, with or without you.” Throughout the record, Bobbitt returns again and again to the ocean, not just as a symbol but as part of her internal landscape. The album is textured by loss, yet it resists despair. It offers a return not just to home, but to self, a reclamation of the things that remain after the tide recedes.
The voice is what grabs you first. Rachel Bobbitt wields her jazz-trained instrument like a guitar or keyboard, gliding between phrases then landing with unshowy precision. She stacks harmonies that feel conversational, layering them in conversation with herself, sometimes subtly and sometimes pulling focus. The album begins and ends with dynamic tracks that start lullaby-gentle and explode into full-band reveries. “Don’t Cry” is an ode to best friendship and Bobbitt’s coming-of-age in rural Nova Scotia, a reflection on girlhood and the confusion and discomfort that accompany it.
The first half of the album chronicles a series of losses Bobbitt has endured in recent years. “Hush” started as a demo comprised solely of Bobbitt’s vocal layers, then placed upon a bedrock of drum machine and keys, capturing the ache of a love story that never quite was. Those voices press against the pulsing bed of programming, creating a soft panic that matches the lyric’s tug between control and surrender. The chorus opens up just enough to give you that small lift in the solar plexus, the kind that makes you hit repeat before the track even ends.
“Light” carries a whimsical classical guitar through its ethereal drift, described by Bobbitt as capturing the in-between and transitory feeling of memories. Then comes “Hands Hands Hands,” which pulls in thicker low end and bashing drums for something that sounds almost celebratory until you catch the lyric. Bobbitt pleads, “Tell me you’re okay,” over a deceptively joyful synth line, building a dramatic elegy out of contradictory parts. The first verse deals with losing someone from a distance, the second verse sliding into surreal images of helplessness and horror. She sings about tomatoes from the garden, paper bags filled with water, hands in the dirt, all these small gestures that become unbearable when the person attached to them is gone. The chorus borrows melody from “Reuben and Rachel,” a children’s song from the 1870s that her grandfather used to sing. That detail, a family tune threaded into a song about loss, gives the track an extra layer of ache. It’s the stunning lead single for good reason.
“Remember” arrives with a mellow, mournful synth line accompanying Bobbitt’s ode to her mother and grandmother, and the moment she found herself comforting the person who once comforted her. She describes having to parent upward in that moment, and how seeing that role fall down forever deepened the relationship and the love.
The guitar work throughout is the record’s quiet secret. Justice Der threads understated parts that shift the mood without demanding attention. He favours tone over flash, letting single-note figures bloom into chords or dissolve into texture. Nothing’s there just for decoration.
The back half of the album opens with “Furthest Limb,” Bobbitt’s biggest vocal swing, pushing to her highest notes between guitar hits as she searches for reassurance amid a growing disconnect with a loved one. “I Want It All” explores Bobbitt’s mental health in mid-tempo territory, while the dark and moody “Life By The Marsh” finds her so close to the mic it feels like she’s singing directly into your heart. “Ask Again” washes over you with shimmery guitars mirroring the relentless churn of self-doubt and OCD-induced looping thoughts.
The final stretch embraces the thrill of new infatuation, landing somewhere between Laurel Canyon warmth and the closing credits of a ’90s romcom. “Deer On The Freeway” finds Der’s guitar tracing the nervousness of early attraction, twitchy and bright, while the rhythm section keeps things grounded. “Sweetest Heart” lets the arrangement loosen around the beat, a little shimmer of chorus guitar and a drum part that refuses to fill every space. You can almost hear the band deciding to hold back. The closing track “Nothing” quietly stacks up memories before spiralling out into a formless vocal release, fading to the album’s end, an aural symbol of the afterlife that almost pushes you back to the start.
Lyrically, Rachel Bobbitt works in snapshots. No big statements, no underlined themes. Loss shows up as something ongoing rather than a single moment, described in one song as never a starting point but a lack of all that was, like a light you didn’t know was shining suddenly getting flicked off. That line does more work than a full verse of explanation could manage. The songs leave room for you to bring your own reading, and they get better the more times you return to them. Like the ocean turns discarded bottles into frosted glass, these memories and dreams of loss and girlhood become something tangible and true.
The album stumbles slightly with pacing in the middle stretch. A sharper turn between some of the mid-tempo tracks would’ve helped define the arc more clearly. The lyrics also get buried in reverb sometimes, which fits the vibe but can soften lines that deserve to hit harder. Neither issue bothered me much after a few spins.
Chris Coady, who’s worked with Beach House, Future Islands and DIIV, brings glassy depth to the production without smothering anything. The mix leaves space for small details to survive: a guitar harmonic here, a barely audible doubled vocal at the edge of the stereo field. You hear the work that went into it, but you also hear the room, the hands, the breath. Percussion has real weight. Synths have texture instead of blurring into mush. James McAlister’s drums, present on most tracks, sit solid and purposeful in the mix.
You can hear Nova Scotia in the songs. There’s weather in there. Not in a heavy-handed way, more like it shaped the decisions without announcing itself. Coady caught it without overdoing anything, reshaping bits of Maritime memory into something that feels immediate.
I keep coming back to “More,” the song that first got me paying attention to Rachel Bobbitt. That track knew when to shut up, when to leave silence where other writers would’ve kept piling things on. Swimming Towards the Sand takes that instinct and stretches it across a full album, with sharper focus and gutsier production choices. It doesn’t go chasing big emotional moments. It lets them develop naturally. Bobbitt describes it as her most fully realized work, and it shows. By the end, you’ve spent enough time in this world that a second listen feels like returning somewhere familiar. It’s a confident debut that works best late at night, on long drives, in those hours when old memories drift close.
Swimming Towards the Sand is out October 17 via Fantasy Records.
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