8/10

LUISA’s 'Wanderlust' is the kind of record you can almost step into of. From the first notes, you’re being carried through fragments of a life lived between borders, languages, and constantly shifting ground. It’s a work that pulses with motion, where every track feels like a page torn from a journal that’s been filled in airports, apartments, protests, and half-remembered rooms.

What makes 'Wanderlust' so gripping is how it treats geography as emotion. Rather than presenting tidy travel postcards, LUISA builds musical spaces that breathe with lived experience. Opener 'Heart' moves like a soft, reflective wander through distant places, its piano lines gently threading together echoes from far-flung corners of the world.

Then there’s 'Spring', which glows with a fragile warmth, like a snapshot of a place just before it changes forever. It carries a tender innocence, as if the air itself were still unaware of what was coming. In contrast, 'Rise', which previously featured on her EP of the same name, crackles with urgency and collective energy, stitched together from the sounds of people refusing to be silent.

Throughout the album, LUISA’s ear for texture is astonishing. 'Enchant' spirals with voices and percussion that seem to stretch back through centuries, while 'Storm' turns raw weather into something almost cinematic, reminding you how small and alive we are beneath the sky. 'Isolate' drifts through quiet, uneasy spaces, capturing the strange stillness of being far from home when the world itself feels locked down. Moments of calm appear too, especially on 'Sail', which feels like a deep breath after a long, exhausting journey, and 'Soar', which lifts with a joyful, street-level spontaneity that’s impossible not to smile at.

What ties it all together is LUISA’s unique way of blending classical sensitivity with modern electronic craft. Every field recording and melodic turn carries the weight of somewhere real and something felt.

'Wanderlust' is, at its core, a love letter to movement through identity, resilience, and time. LUISA has created a body of work that doesn’t just tell you where she’s been, but lets you feel what it meant to be there.