Alex Amor finds the human heart inside Heavenly Bodies

Alex Amor has spent the past few months revealing Heavenly Bodies piece by piece, and hearing the full album makes those earlier singles feel less like standalone statements and more like stars slowly forming a constellation. Released on 21st August, her debut is a 12-track record about love, grief, adulthood, spirituality and the strange ways those things keep colliding.

The scale is cosmic, but the writing rarely floats away from real life. Alex uses moons, angels, oceans, fire and mythology to make sense of relationships, bereavement and the fear of losing people, wrapping intensely personal writing in shimmering guitars, soft synths and slow-burning alt-pop arrangements.

Looking upwards without losing sight of the ground

Alex Amor opens with ‘As Above, So Below’, immediately establishing the album’s fascination with the connection between the enormous and the intimate. The title comes from the metaphysical idea that the small human world reflects the larger universe, and Alex turns that into a love song where particles, shadows and the Milky Way sit beside a simple promise that somebody is not alone.

‘Seeing Angels’ carries that spirituality straight into devotion. Rebirth, salvation and religious imagery surround a relationship in which Alex wants to cleanse somebody of what came before, but there is enough desire in the song to stop all that heavenly language becoming precious. The album is already showing its hand: transcendence here usually has a body attached.

That becomes painfully clear on ‘Meet On The Moon’. Written for a late friend, it imagines grief through somebody still shining above you, turning memory into something tender rather than purely devastating. The details give it its force, from red lips and a pink dress to the sense of a person whose spirit was always too vivid to disappear quietly.

There is comfort in imagining another meeting somewhere beyond this life, but Alex never treats loss as an easy spiritual puzzle she has solved. ‘Meet On The Moon’ works because longing remains intact even while the song reaches for something reassuring. The sky gives her somewhere to look, not an answer.

‘Aquamarine’ brings the record back towards earth and sea, with salt air, west-coast memories and a lover cast as both lighthouse and clear water after a storm. We previously heard its soft Americana glow as one of the gentler clues to the album, and in sequence it provides a welcome openness after the grief of ‘Meet On The Moon’.

Its romantic imagery is uncomplicated in the best way. Alex wants to swim, surrender and trust somebody to bring her home, giving Heavenly Bodies a moment where love feels restorative rather than dangerous. The ease does not last.

‘Avalanche’ is where the relationship pressure starts cracking through the surface. Alex has had enough of promises, scripts and carrying two people through something that neither can properly repair, and the central image is brutal in its simplicity: collapse may be the only thing capable of setting both people free.

The anger becomes hotter on ‘This Must Be The End’. Alex has described the song as dealing with “complex female rage”, and the lyrics make that complexity obvious. She has cared, healed and given warmth, but resentment has reached the point where tenderness and fury can no longer be separated.

The repeated fire imagery gives the song an almost physical heat. Alex refuses the role of ingénue or endlessly patient healer, and that refusal feels central to the album’s wider movement towards self-definition. Love can be sacred here, but it is not supposed to consume the person giving it.

‘Icarus’ follows with one of the record’s sharpest uses of mythology. The person Alex loves keeps flying towards danger as though consequence were optional, leaving her to watch somebody she cannot save test the limits of their own destruction.

The image is grand, but the relationship beneath it is painfully recognisable. Loving someone who keeps heading towards the edge eventually forces a choice between devotion and self-preservation, and Alex reaches the point where she will no longer hold them back. Honey on the wings makes the fall look seductive right until gravity remembers its job.

‘Still Your Girl’ strips away some of that symbolic scale and becomes devastatingly ordinary. One person is already emotionally gone while the other keeps dragging out the goodbye, asking for reassurance even when she knows it may be a lie. The Titanic joke is almost cruelly funny, with Alex panicking as the relationship sinks while her partner is pragmatic enough to reach for the life jacket.

That humour stops the heartbreak becoming melodramatic. Alex understands how ridiculous desperation can look from the outside while still respecting how awful it feels from within, and the song captures that final stage of a relationship where dignity has become considerably less important than hearing one comforting sentence.

‘Sweet Loathing’ might contain the album’s messiest romantic contradiction. Love, rage, care and contempt occupy the same bed, while quiet fury grows underneath a relationship held together by habit, physical intimacy and years of accumulated resentment.

The phrase “rupture and romance” could almost stand in for half the album. Alex is fascinated by feelings that refuse to remain tidy categories, and ‘Sweet Loathing’ lets attraction survive alongside the knowledge that something fundamental has already fractured. It is uncomfortable, intimate and beautifully unresolved.

Then comes ‘Inside’, still the record’s centre of gravity even this late in the sequence. Across nearly six minutes, Alex moves through a long-term relationship, grief, friends lost to overdose, intergenerational trauma and memories of her grandmother, all while confronting the defensive habits that have shaped her twenties.

The song began as a sprawling poem, and preserving that scale was the right decision. Thoughts arrive the way grief often does, without waiting for the previous one to finish neatly, and the repeated insistence that these people remain “inside” becomes less a chorus than a way of refusing disappearance.

What struck me when reviewing ‘Inside’ on its own was the way buoyant guitars and floating synths could carry writing this heavy without trivialising it. Inside the album, that balance feels even more important. Heavenly Bodies is never interested in sadness for its own sake; Alex keeps searching for movement, connection and some form of life beyond whatever hurt produced the song.

‘Roses’ is quieter but no less direct. Flowers decompose, bodies keep us tied to earth and Alex talks aloud to somebody who has gone in the hope that, across time or distance, those words might still reach them. Grief is no longer explosive here. It has become part of the furniture of living.

The line between spirituality and desperation becomes especially thin when she asks for a sign. That uncertainty is one of the album’s greatest strengths. Alex clearly finds comfort in meditation, symbolism and ideas larger than herself, but the songs rarely pretend faith removes the ache.

Final track ‘Only The Beginning’ earns its place by refusing to end the album in mourning. A collapsing star becomes permission to leave an old life behind, and the language shifts towards power, renewal and opening rather than loss. After spending so much of the record asking what remains when people or relationships disappear, Alex finally turns towards what might come next.

That arc fits the circumstances in which Heavenly Bodies was made. Alex wrote through a period of upheaval that included leaving London, spending time back home in Glasgow and eventually moving to Brighton, using the distance to rethink what she wanted from both life and music. Meditation, rune reading and the work of Swedish painter Hilma af Klint all fed into the album’s spiritual vocabulary.

The artistic influences never feel pasted on for atmosphere. ‘As Above, So Below’ takes its name directly from a metaphysical principle, while the album title can refer equally to celestial spheres and the human bodies occupying its love songs. Alex keeps pulling the universe down to human scale until spirituality becomes another language for talking about grief, sex, intimacy and change.

That same coherence carries into the sound. Working closely with Peter Brien, Baz Kaye and Karma Kid, Alex recorded in Hackney Wick with an intentionally small group of collaborators, later bringing in Matthew Neighbour for the mix and Katie Tavini for mastering. The result feels warm rather than pristine, with enough haze around the guitars and synths to let the songs drift without losing their edges.

There is a genuine album here, not a playlist of singles with some connective tissue added afterwards. The softer songs make the angrier ones hit harder, romantic certainty keeps giving way to doubt, and celestial imagery becomes richer as the human stories beneath it accumulate. By the time ‘Only The Beginning’ arrives, the title Heavenly Bodies feels less decorative than inevitable.

Heavenly Bodies review

Heavenly Bodies is the kind of debut album that makes the years before it suddenly look like preparation. ‘As Above, So Below’ and ‘Seeing Angels’ establish its spiritual language, ‘Meet On The Moon’ and ‘Roses’ turn grief towards the sky, ‘Avalanche’, ‘This Must Be The End’, ‘Icarus’, ‘Still Your Girl’ and ‘Sweet Loathing’ pull relationships through anger, dependence and collapse, while ‘Aquamarine’ and ‘Inside’ find different forms of love capable of keeping somebody tethered to life. Alex’s writing is intimate without becoming small, and the dreamy production gives every confession enough space to linger.

The singles already suggested Alex was reaching a new level, but the full record is considerably more convincing than any one preview could be. She has made something sad without making sadness its personality, spiritual without disappearing into abstraction, and beautiful without smoothing away the uglier feelings underneath. Heavenly Bodies feels like Alex Amor arriving at the sound she has been circling for years, and the final promise that this is only the beginning is one I am more than happy to believe.

Photo Credit: Lewis Vorn