I’ve been sitting with this album for a few days which is honestly longer than I sit with most things. I’m not good at sitting still, having spent most of my twenties running toward whatever felt urgent and filling my calendar with plans so I wouldn’t have to think too hard about the quieter questions. The ones like what is love actually doing in my life and am I receiving it from the places that matter? I grew up believing love lived in romance and in big declarations and the right person showing up at the right time. And then one afternoon I was sitting with my mother just watching TV and she reached over and fixed my hair without saying a word. No fanfare. Just her hands, doing what they’ve always done. That quiet, automatic care she’d been pouring into me my entire life without either of us naming it. alayna’s sophomore album Set Her Free is the reason I keep coming back to that moment. This New Zealand singer-songwriter built an entire universe around the idea that love is everywhere we forget to look, woven into matrilineal bonds and the mundane magic of a relationship that actually holds, right up to the terrifying grace of letting go. Thirteen tracks. And every single one lands.
Rotorua-born alayna spent her acclaimed 2023 debut turning herself inside out and the world listened to the tune of over 85 million streams. Collaborations with FINNEAS, Ta-ku, and Sango had already established her as a serious artist with serious emotional range. When that first album ran its course she found herself depleted and instead of digging deeper inward she turned her gaze outward. What she found there became Set Her Free, built across a writing camp in Bali, sessions in Los Angeles, and finally shaped into a record alongside executive producer Ben Malone back home in Aotearoa. “After Self Portrait, I could see everything a bit clearer. The common thread was that love was woven into everything,” she explains. And honestly, that alone stopped me. “It’s the glue in a family dinner table – you’re looking at a table, and you appreciate that you get to eat from it. But what about the very thing holding it all together? That’s the glue. That’s the love.” That image of the glue wrecked me a little, because I’ve spent years admiring the table and completely ignoring what was holding it together.
‘Mother’s Mother’ opens the record and announces this album is going to ask you to look at the love you’ve been taking for granted. This is a song about the women who shaped us and alayna writes it with the reverence of someone who has finally found language for a feeling she’s carried her entire life. “You hung the stars and the moon too / it was you / you coloured my world every shade and hue.” That opening is patient and unhurried, and it wraps around you before you’ve had a chance to prepare for it. The production holds space around her vocals without crowding them. She sounds like she’s writing a letter she’s been composing for years.
The chorus builds on this hypnotic repetition, “water water water water water / til all my roots were grounded / blooming flowers surrounded,” and you feel it accumulating, generations of care stacked on top of each other. She maps it genealogically: “mothers mothers mothers mothers mother / all of them had a hand in / growing this beautiful garden.” The song closes with “look how beautiful / the garden that you’ve grown,” and that line undid me completely. I called my grandmother the same evening. What alayna does here is make you feel the full weight of a love that predates you, the love that built the ground you’re standing on, and she makes it feel urgent and immediate.
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From there the album shifts its focus and ‘Tiny Spaces’ is where it opens up first. This is the current single and I understand completely why they chose it. alayna is writing about the specific intimacy of a relationship that has settled into something true, the love that doesn’t need to perform because it’s already proven. “Ten trillion stars and not one quite as warm as when I get to lay in your arms / what a feeling.” That lyric hit different. I’ve heard a thousand songs try to capture that particular safety and most of them reach for spectacle. She reaches for warmth. That moment got me.
The song earns its most intimate images in the second verse. “You run through my ceiling / and all the veins in my eyelids.” That’s intimacy written at the cellular level, the kind of love that doesn’t stop at the edges of you. And then the chorus delivers: “a love so big but it still fits / we dive right in / embrace it / baby a love like this was made to sit / in all the tiny spaces.” The image of enormous love fitting into small places is so specific and so true that it lands somewhere quietly devastating. This is a song about a love that has made itself at home in the ordinary moments, and alayna trusts those moments enough to build an entire single around them. You should trust it too.
‘Love You More’ is where alayna does something that genuinely wrecked me. I’ve heard a thousand songs about holding on. She writes about letting go and frames it as the whole point. “I don’t own you I / I just love you back / simple as the fact / I love you more than I love us.” That’s the line. The distinction she draws there, between loving a person and loving the relationship you’ve built around them, is something I’ve understood intellectually for years and never heard said this plainly or this quietly.
She gives us “I could let go, if it meant you would grow,” and honestly I had to stop the album. That distinction between loving a person and loving what you’ve built around them hit somewhere personal. I’ve held onto people long past the point where letting go was the kinder thing, and dressed it up as devotion the whole time. This song doesn’t let that slide. The production around her stays spare, which is exactly right. Anything more ornate would distract from what the lyric is actually doing.
And then comes ‘Animal,’ and the temperature of the whole album shifts. This is alayna in full physical command, writing about desire and autonomy with a directness that makes everything around it feel quieter by comparison. She described this track as “all body,” and you feel that from the moment the production changes under her. “You want to touch my heaven? / get on your knees / prey to me.” The play between pray and prey is doing a lot of work here: get on your knees carries the full weight of both worship and something far more carnal, and alayna knows exactly which one she means. That’s genius.
The confidence she moves with here is something to witness. “I came to eat.” Three words. She doesn’t explain herself or build toward it. The song operates from a place of total certainty about her own desire and her own worth. “You must be sacred to touch my skin / to be let in to my wilderness.” Access is earned here, not assumed. The whole track is a barely disguised ode to oral sex written from the receiving end, and alayna makes it sound like the most natural claim in the world. After the tenderness of the album’s first half, this arrival feels earned and necessary and damn near electrifying.
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‘Softly’ follows and alayna pivots inward, this time to the uncomfortable reckoning of realizing you’ve been looking for something in entirely the wrong place. ” Looking outside for something that I’m craving / trying to find it in his validation / so disappointed when he couldn’t make it. “ I’ve been there. Most of us have – even the ones who’d never admit it out loud. She just names the impulse and moves through it, and there’s a grace in that I find genuinely moving.
What she finds on the other side is the foundation that was there the whole time, “all of the love I’ve ever had it lays right here.” And then: “the heavenly feminine stays as the genesis of my whole life.” And just like that, the album circles back to where it started, matriarchy. The whole record keeps returning to this and each time it arrives somewhere that feels new. “When it all comes down / falling in and out love / but I still land softly.” The softness she lands in is the love that was built before she was born. See, that’s what this whole album is really about. That’s the thread.
‘Brave Heart’ and ‘On the Way Home’ are two other tracks worth your full attention. Give them the time they deserve.
Set Her Free closes on its title track and alayna strips everything back to near-silence. The track is largely instrumental, built around a single question she lets repeat until it becomes something closer to a meditation than a lyric: “what of I, if I set her free / what of I, if I set her free.” And then the whole record arrives at: “what’s left of me?” That question hangs in the air without resolution, which is exactly right. She lets the question breathe, unanswered, and trusts you to sit with it.
She explained that this record “was in my bones for a long time,” and then added something I keep coming back to: “I want to celebrate how extraordinary the capacity of the heart of a woman is.” Thirteen tracks in, with the matriarchy and the tenderness and the heat and the letting go all stacked behind you, that statement lands with its full weight. alayna built something here that keeps growing the longer you sit with it.
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