On the fiery title track to her debut, 22-year-old Lauren Pritchard forsakes a drab life in her Tennessee hometown. It's a perfect calling card for a restless striver who performed in Spring Awakening before landing in London to record Wasted in Jackson. The album is all neo-Dusty drama: big voice, big strings, big heartache. It's formulaic, but it mixes Southern orneriness with Brit-style quirks; "Bad Time to Fall" is a happy funk tune about hating happy tunes, and on the Marcus Mumford-produced art-folk number "When the Night Kills the Day," Pritchard moans with the dark, outsize passion of Kate Bush.

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“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”