Some records sound like they were written to explain things. Casual Dining doesn’t. It sounds like it was written because there wasn’t any other way to carry it.
Kelli Blanchett built this EP out of a period that changed her life. After stepping back through most of 2024 while chronic illness took over, she came back with five songs that don’t try to polish the experience into something inspirational. They stay close to the awkward parts instead. Isolation. Embarrassment. The fear of being left behind. The strange grief of realising your old life is not waiting for you.
That is what gives this record its shape. It is framed as a break-up, but not with another person. It is a break-up with the version of yourself you assumed you would keep being. That idea alone gives Casual Dining more to say than most debut-adjacent alt-folk releases manage in twice the runtime.
The sound fits the writing properly. Kelli draws from 70s singer-songwriter records, and you can hear that in the plucky guitars, the soft organs, the strings that ache without making a scene about it. Nothing here feels crowded. The arrangements leave room for the words to do their job, and that matters because these songs are carrying a lot.
There is also no sense of hiding behind prettiness. The EP sounds warm, but not cosy. Honest, but not performative. It knows exactly where it hurts.
Review
What I like about Casual Dining is that it never begs for sympathy. That would have been the easy route. Instead, Kelli writes from inside the mess of it all and leaves you to deal with how recognisable that feels.
‘Hiding in Plain Sight’ is the obvious place your mind stays for a while. The song comes from the disappearance of a friend during a period when Kelli was already trying to survive her own difficult stretch, and you can hear the contradiction in it. Sadness, frustration, confusion, all at once. It doesn’t simplify any of that, which is exactly why it lands. Friendship songs usually get flattened into nostalgia or blame. This doesn’t.
More broadly, the EP works because each song feels like it belongs to the same emotional world without collapsing into one long mood. That is harder to pull off than people think. You get the sense of a songwriter who knows when to leave a line alone, when to let an arrangement breathe, when to trust that a feeling is already strong enough.
And that’s probably the thing that stayed with me most. Trust. Kelli doesn’t oversell the pain here. She doesn’t underline it three times in red pen. She just puts it in front of you and lets it sit there. That confidence gives Casual Dining a quiet force.
It’s a lovely record. Not lovely because it’s soft, but because it’s brave enough to sound this exposed without turning the whole thing into theatre.
You can follow Kelli Blanchett over on Instagram and listen to Casual Dining in all the usual places.
