Lilly Among Clouds

Elisabeth Brüchner came into the world in 1990 inside a family already immersed in music and spent her childhood amid the striking scenery of Lower Bavaria, the southeastern German region that borders Austria. Drawn to sound from an early age, she first studied piano and later took up guitar. Songwriting followed under the sway of Alanis Morissette, Tori Amos, Norah Jones, and, in time, Rihanna; while still a teenager she began performing her own material in neighborhood venues under the name Lilly Among Thorns. Only after she won a Finnish battle-of-the-bands contest—earning a slot at the next year’s Maata Näkyvissä Festival in Turku before ten thousand listeners—did she begin to view music as a possible livelihood.

At twenty she relocated to Würzburg in northern Bavaria and assembled a band that shared the Lilly Among Thorns title. The group tracked several alt-pop numbers, among them the striking “Illusions,” yet never issued any recordings. Persistent self-doubt about her direction ended when she met producer Udo Rinklin, the architect behind Laith al-Deen’s 2004 German number-one album Für Alle. His collaboration sparked rapid creative development, marked by her 2014 receipt of the Würzburg Young Culture Prize. She subsequently renamed the project Lilly Among Clouds and, again with Rinklin, self-released a debut EP that carried her new moniker. The recording drew praise and comparisons to Fiona Apple, Cat Power, Regina Spektor, Adele, and Amos, leading to a deal with PIAS.

Rinklin also helmed her first full-length effort, 2017’s Aerial Perspective, whose electronic passages evoked the style of fellow English-singing Germanic artists such as Sigrid and Lykke Li. Lilly Among Clouds fuses retro pop, soul, and classic rock with understated electronic touches, all propelled by a strikingly deep, commanding, and husky vocal timbre that belies her years.