Afterlight

From late 2021 onward, Oxford, England-born, folk-inspired singer/songwriter Thea Gilmore adopted Afterlight as her alias for new releases following an acrimonious divorce from Nigel Stonier, her musical partner of more than twenty years. Between 1998 and 2019 she issued seventeen studio albums, all helmed by Stonier, the multi-instrumentalist formerly of the 1980s folk-rock band Northern Sky whom she first encountered at Dave Pegg’s Woodworm Studios. Although her output earned consistent praise from the music press, it never yielded a decisive commercial breakthrough. Three albums from the middle of the decade—2013’s Regardless, 2015’s Ghosts & Graffiti, and 2017’s The Counterweight—nevertheless each entered the U.K. Top 40. By the time Small World Turning appeared in 2019, her partnership with Stonier had ended, making that release her final project under his production guidance. October 2021 saw the simultaneous arrival of two albums that both addressed the separation. The Emancipation of Eva Grey, a jazz-inspired collection, marked her last recording issued under the name Thea Gilmore. The second of the pair, Afterlight, became the inaugural release under the new alias. Produced by Seadna McPhail—a prior collaborator who had also worked with Jane Weaver, Badly Drawn Boy, and I Am Kloot—the album combined sparse, intense, and unwaveringly confident songwriting with spoken-word poems framing pared-back tracks alongside lushly produced full-band arrangements. One such arrangement, the track “Spotlight,” contained a tasteful descending bass line that recalled the playing on “Simple Twist of Fate” from Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, an album Gilmore has long cited as an influence.