Released: 14 May 2021
Rating: ****
Delta Goodrem looks to new beginnings on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Dreams’ – her seventh studio album and most accomplished effort yet.
The album has been a long time coming for the star, who released its lead track Keep Climbing back in May, 2020.
Exactly one year – and five singles – later, Delta unleashes its parent record, featuring 11 tracks all co-written and co-produced by the singer-songwriter.
Keep Climbing opens the record and sets the tone for a collection of tracks that look inward and share her most personal stories with the world.
Look to Everyone’s Famous as an exploration of the nature of fame and the challenges it presents, or All of My Friends and its musings on the impact of success on close relationships.
Meanwhile, Crash is particularly poignant, recounting how a car accident prompted her own mother to give birth to her prematurely.
As a singer, Delta’s voice is as pure and clear as ever before, but it’s in her songwriting that the star excels herself this time around.
And the songs take centre stage on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Dreams’, with the instrumentation largely kept to an acoustic piano and production kept to a minimum.
It’s been five years since Delta’s last non-festive LP ‘Wings of the Wild’, an upbeat power-pop record, packed with anthems sure to make you feel indestructible.
This time around she’s a little more exposed, but through finding strength in her scars the hitmaker crafts a body of work that paves the way to a brighter future and cements her legacy as one of Australia’s premier musicians.
