Some albums don’t just ask to be heard—they demand to be felt. Catherine Elms’ Bring in the Wild, released on August 8, 2025, is one such work. Across twelve striking tracks, the Welsh alternative singer-songwriter turns inward, unearthing the messy, intense, and often unspoken sides of the human experience. This isn’t a collection of neatly packaged pop anthems—it’s a dark, poetic, and visceral confrontation with the emotions we’re often taught to suppress.
From the moment the first track, “The Darker Half,” swells into being, Elms sets the tone for a journey that’s both intimate and cinematic. There’s a weight in her voice, a deliberate gravity that feels like she’s speaking from a place that most of us keep locked away. Her arrangements—lush and expansive but with a sharp emotional edge—create a soundscape that feels both theatrical and uncomfortably close. It’s the duality that defines the album: grandeur paired with vulnerability, control set against the chaos she’s unafraid to embrace.
“Brutal Heart,” one of the lead singles, is an unflinching study of emotional brutality—the kind we inflict on others and the kind we turn inward. It’s a track that manages to be both devastating and empowering, a hallmark of Elms’ style. Like much of her work, it doesn’t chase resolution; instead, it sits in the tension, letting it simmer until it becomes something almost beautiful. That same confrontational beauty runs through “Medusa,” where myth and modern pain intertwine in a swirling storm of piano, drums, and soaring vocals. There’s venom here, but also an undeniable sense of reclamation.
Her songwriting is deeply influenced by Jungian psychology, and Bring in the Wild plays like a guided journey into the shadow self. On “If Destroyed Still True,” she meditates on the ways our identities survive upheaval, her voice weaving through atmospheric instrumentation that feels as if it’s floating just beyond reach. “I’m Used to That By Now” takes a more sardonic approach, its resigned tone disguising a deep well of yearning beneath the surface.
“Sinister” and “Things to Keep Hidden” explore the edges of secrecy and shame, leaning into haunting chord progressions that recall Kate Bush at her most eerie. These songs don’t offer cathartic release; instead, they invite listeners to sit in the discomfort and listen to what it has to say. The hypnotic “Running in Place” captures the exhausting rhythm of stagnation—how we can be in motion and yet going nowhere, stuck in cycles that feel impossible to break.
One of the most striking tracks is “I Want,” a confessional unraveling of desire in its rawest form. There’s something fearless in how Elms allows want to stand unapologetically, unsoftened by societal expectations. In “Sin Sister,” she plays with archetypes and archetypal guilt, layering harmonies that shift between angelic and accusatory.
As the album moves toward its conclusion, “Ritual” offers a sense of deliberate transformation—a reminder that change can be both painful and sacred. “Spiral” closes the record with a kind of quiet devastation, its repetition evoking the cyclical nature of self-discovery and self-destruction. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s an honest one, which in many ways is the heart of Elms’ artistry.
Bring in the Wild doesn’t shy away from its influences—there are echoes of Fiona Apple’s raw piano confessions, Nick Cave’s shadowy lyricism, and the dramatic flair of early Tori Amos—but it never feels derivative. Instead, Elms synthesizes these touchstones into a voice entirely her own. Her music carries the theatricality of performance art but stays rooted in the personal truths of lived experience.
The production, rich and deliberate, supports the thematic weight without overwhelming it. Every track feels sculpted to serve the emotion at its core—piano lines that ache, percussion that pulses like a heartbeat, string swells that lift and then drop you back into silence. It’s a record that breathes, and in that breath there’s space for both beauty and brutality.
Elms herself has said that the album is about “making peace with the parts of myself I used to suppress and learning to hear what they have to teach me.” That mission statement pulses through every lyric, every chord change, every pause between words. It’s a call to embrace the wildness inside us—not in the romanticized sense, but in the difficult, uncomfortable, and necessary ways that lead to growth.
The album has already caught the attention of critics, with BBC Radio Wales calling it “brilliant” and Plastic Magazine naming her “a must-watch artist in the alternative rock scene of the UK and beyond.” Yet Bring in the Wild feels like more than just a career milestone—it feels like an arrival, the kind of record that an artist spends years quietly building toward, brick by emotional brick.
For those looking to celebrate this release in person, Elms will host an album launch party at Porters, Cardiff, on September 5th. It promises to be an evening as immersive and emotionally charged as the record itself, a space where her songs can unfold in their full, live intensity.
In an industry often obsessed with polish and palatability, Bring in the Wild is refreshingly—and sometimes uncomfortably—human. Catherine Elms invites us into the mess, the shadow, and the beauty of embracing every part of who we are. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s a necessary one, and for those willing to take the plunge, it might just change the way you see yourself.
Catherine Elms has always been a fearless artist, but here she has outdone herself, creating a body of work that doesn’t just entertain—it challenges, teaches, and transforms. In Bring in the Wild, she proves that there’s a power in looking straight into the darkness and deciding to stay there long enough to learn its language. And once you do, you might just find, as Elms has, that the wild was never something to fear—it was the truest part of you all along.
