Liya Shapiro has released her debut EP Another Woman, a dark and intimate project shaped by love, identity, mental health and the aftershocks of unrequited feeling.
The London-based singer-songwriter frames the record around a years-long experience, with songs written across different phases before being shaped into what she describes as an emotional diary. Its timeline is not linear, but the EP moves with a clear inner pull, tracing longing, grief and the slow work of becoming someone else after it.
The title carries two meanings. It refers to the woman at the centre of the title track, but also to the person Shapiro became after the experience, giving the record a quiet tension between what happened and what survived.
A debut EP built like an emotional diary
Another Woman opens with a short, strings-led introduction, setting a classical and chamber-influenced frame before the songs move deeper into the story. The title track then becomes the EP’s centre, written in a single sitting after Shapiro learned that the person she had spent years trying to move past had moved on.
‘Night Thoughts’ turns inward, using a more stripped and textured arrangement influenced by French chanson to capture the hour when buried feelings return. ‘Hold Me Tight’ brings together two versions of Shapiro, with verses written around seven years ago and a later chorus that reframes the song through distance and self-awareness.
There is also a strong visual and conceptual thread running through the project. Shapiro’s background in art history, fashion and anthropology feeds into the way she thinks about sound, image and the human condition, while ‘He’s Earthquakes’ draws from J. M. W. Turner’s storm seascapes to close the EP with an orchestral sense of weather and unrest.
‘Another Woman’ EP review: longing held in motion
As a debut EP, Another Woman is most affecting when it refuses to tidy the feeling it describes. The strings-led opening, swelling chamber rock of ‘Another Woman’, late-night hush of ‘Night Thoughts’ and guitar-driven pop-rock shape of ‘Hold Me Tight’ give the record movement without making recovery sound simple.
Shapiro’s writing sits close to the wound, but the EP is not trapped inside it. By placing older and newer selves in the same body of work, she turns private fixation into a fuller portrait of self-trust, where fragility is treated as part of the structure rather than something to hide.
Since releasing her debut single ‘Mirror’ in 2021, Shapiro has continued as a fully independent, self-managed artist. Her 2025 single ‘Burning Bridges’ became her first track to pass 50,000 streams, and her work has since passed 150,000 Spotify streams in total.
Follow Liya Shapiro via her website, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.
