Penelope Isles | 3 [Bella Union]
Indie Rock / Dream Pop / Indie Pop | 2026
Jack and Lily Wolter have come back to Penelope Isles with a different way of working. After separate projects and five years between albums, the siblings wrote together from the start and welcomed Joe Taylor as the group's third permanent member. They recorded 3 largely live in ten days at Black Bay Studio on the Isle of Lewis. The change is audible in the phrasing: guitar parts stretch beyond their tidy melodies, Taylor varies the pressure of a beat, and the shared vocals retain slight irregularities that make their singing affecting.
Opening track "Another Kind Of Love" establishes how gently they can press an uncomfortable question. A soft keyboard line, clear guitar chords and unhurried bass leave room for a lyric about romance beyond conventional categories. The repeated question in the chorus remains unresolved. Its melodic lift carries genuine curiosity without forcing an answer.
"I Loved You, Robert Pattinson" is the album's decisive expansion. The lyric uses an adolescent celebrity crush to revisit growing up, making mistakes and believing you had already figured everything out. Lily and Jack exchange lines, while Taylor's rolls push the guitars toward a long, distorted finale. That surge is especially effective because the earlier verses are so conversational. The song earns its five minutes through arrangement and emotional development.
The band's affection for specific people and places is clearest on "Bom-Bane's" and "Embo". The former takes its name from a Brighton restaurant and mixes close, understated singing with a rough guitar ending. The latter revisits a seafront flat at Embassy Court in just 77 seconds, with spare accompaniment and the siblings' voices supplying nearly all the emotional detail. "Birthdays" sits between them, developing a repeating guitar figure and harmonies that become increasingly insistent. Their modest scale is central to the record's character.
"Pretty In Pixels" brings synthesizers into the band's guitar-centered pop, and "Moonwalker" shifts meter as the playing turns sharper and heavier. Both offer useful variation. "You Think You Got A Way With Dogs" is a shakier experiment. Its stomp-and-clap rhythm and joking manner interrupt the album's sustained emotional focus, and the tune ends before the eccentricity becomes particularly rewarding. The choice is understandable on a record made with close friends, but it remains the one track I find difficult to return to.
"Thinking Seat" brings the record's anxious side into focus. The title is what the siblings call the driver's seat of their touring van, where hours of travel leave them alone with unfinished arguments and spiraling thoughts. The buoyant chorus repeatedly tries to clear the mind, while the guitars maintain a smooth melodic line against Taylor's active drumming. It is catchy without pretending that the thoughts have stopped.
Closing song "Am I Going Through This On My Own" reduces the arrangement to subdued voices, drum-machine rhythm and soft synth. Lily initially sings the central question alone, and Jack joins later. The shift makes the song's concern with isolation audible without a dramatic climax. Across the album, their vocal phrasing has a familiar closeness, while the sudden changes in guitar volume and drum patterns give the songs their necessary tension.
3 can settle too readily into gentle mid-tempo patterns, especially around its center, and its occasional oddities do not all justify their place. Yet the renewed trio has found considerable expressive range. Its best songs pair exact, slightly embarrassing memories with guitar dynamics that change during the telling.
Rating: [4/5]