Natalie McCool makes the album of her life with Good For The Soul

Natalie McCool has consistently blown me away, so perhaps I should have been prepared for Good For The Soul. I wasn’t. This is the Natalie McCool album I hoped might exist somewhere in her future: huge-hearted, adventurous, occasionally strange, packed with brilliant pop songs and confident enough to let a whole community of other artists into a musical world she has spent years building herself.

Her previous album Memory Girl remains one of my favourite records, a glittering and deeply personal piece of alt-pop that already showed how much Natalie could do when she trusted her instincts. Good For The Soul, released on 9th September, goes much further. Its brighter first half gradually gives way to something darker and stranger, while twelve tracks keep finding new ways to surprise without losing Natalie at their centre.

Natalie opens the doors and everybody brings something

The biggest change is collaboration. Natalie McCool has worked brilliantly with other artists before, including her contributions to Whyte Horses records and the enormous collaborative world she created with Stealing Sheep for Liverpool’s Welcome To Eurotopia, but her own albums have traditionally felt far more self-contained. Here, guests are woven through the record from beginning to end.

That shift can be traced directly to Welcome To Eurotopia. Co-created with Stealing Sheep for Liverpool’s Eurovision celebrations in 2023, the 90-minute show brought guest singers, a ten-piece all-female band, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic strings and a marching brass section together in front of more than 14,000 people. Natalie came away wanting to bring artists she admired into her own songs, and Good For The Soul is the glorious result.

It begins with ‘Coming of Age’, featuring Trans Voices, which could hardly be a better opening. We have already heard Natalie turn finding yourself into a rush of alt-pop joy, but in the context of the album those layered harmonies feel even bigger. This is a record about adulthood, identity and becoming comfortable with everything that has made you who you are, and it starts with people singing together.

‘We’re The Ones’ carries that lift forward but lets mortality and monotonous adulthood creep into the edges. Natalie previously described it through youthful optimism, and the song’s airy verses and bigger rhythmic release capture the giddy feeling of knowing freedom will not last forever and choosing to enjoy it anyway.

Then the guest list starts becoming almost absurdly good. IONE appears on ‘Nobody Knows’, Ellysse Mason features on ‘I Fantasise’, Dilettante joins Natalie on the title track, Renee Stormz arrives on ‘So Lonely, Lonely’, She Drew The Gun features on ‘Sleeping Beauty’, HELLEROID appears on ‘Now The Enemy’, ilā joins ‘Suffering’, and krapka;KOMA close the album alongside Natalie on ‘Into A Diamond’.

The clever part is that none of this turns Good For The Soul into Natalie McCool and Friends. Natalie chose the songs she wanted particular artists to appear on, and that care shows. She is still unmistakably in charge of the record, but she no longer sounds interested in proving she has to do every part alone.

That makes ‘I Fantasise’ feel important in retrospect. Ellysse Mason’s presence already hinted at this more open approach when the track arrived, pairing retro colour and desire with one of Natalie’s brightest pop turns. What first looked like a brilliant standalone collaboration now feels like an early sign of what Good For The Soul would become.

‘So Lonely, Lonely’ is where the record’s atmosphere darkens properly. Natalie looks at isolation, phones and the erosion of real community, while Renee Stormz cuts into the song with exactly the contrasting voice it needs. As we found when the single arrived, it works as a hinge between the exhilaration of the opening stretch and the more unsettled world waiting behind it.

‘Sleeping Beauty’ pushes that darker side further with She Drew The Gun. Written with Danio Forni, it is built around waking up to the less flattering parts of yourself rather than hiding from them, with unusual harmonic movement, strings and breaks designed to keep the listener slightly off balance. Natalie knew she wanted She Drew The Gun on it from the writing stage, and that instinct says a lot about how deliberate these collaborations are.

The Liverpool Philharmonic strings add another level of scale, but Natalie’s own work behind the desk remains central. She taught herself to produce and mix because she could hear the finished songs in her head and wanted the ability to make them sound that way, eventually recording and producing most of Good For The Soul herself.

By that point, the title makes perfect sense. Natalie has said Good For The Soul is about the hope, joy and exhilaration of adulthood, but also about accepting that the painful parts count too. Joy can carry dread, loneliness can sit inside a brilliantly produced pop song, and growing older can feel terrifying and freeing at the same time.

Good For The Soul review

I have spent years saying Natalie McCool deserves to be far bigger, and Good For The Soul makes that argument almost embarrassingly easy. The songs are huge when they need to be, strange when they want to be and full of details that reward going straight back around again, but what I love most is the generosity of the whole thing. Trans Voices, IONE, Ellysse Mason, Dilettante, Renee Stormz, She Drew The Gun, HELLEROID, ilā and krapka;KOMA all leave something behind without ever making Natalie feel like a guest on her own album.

This is the one. Good For The Soul can be dazzling, unnerving and euphoric within the space of a few songs, and it is alive with the kind of ideas that make me want to start it again before ‘Into A Diamond’ has properly finished. Natalie has blown me away repeatedly across her career, but this feels like the record where her songwriting, production and new love of collaboration finally meet at full force. I adore it.

You can pre-save Good For The Soul here, follow Natalie McCool on Instagram and support her directly on Patreon. I strongly recommend buying the physical album from Bandcamp too. This is a record worth owning, not merely streaming.