Nominally a country artist -- she's signed to
Warner Nashville and has written with
Sam Hunt, her first single "More Hearts Than Mine" cracked the Billboard Country Airplay Top 10 in 2019 --
Ingrid Andress doesn't follow the conventional contours of the genre on her 2020 debut,
Lady Like. Largely comprised of songs released as digital singles and EPs over the course of 2019 (just three tracks make their debut here),
Lady Like does indeed feel like music designed to be played on streaming services: it's bright, glossy, and amorphous, shifting styles from verse to chorus. Often, music this multipurpose feels rootless and overcooked, but
Andress is a slyly powerful singer and a sharp songwriter and slyly powerful singer, so the country-pop hybrids on
Lady Like seem like a reflection of her personality, not calculated.
Andress favors aural melodrama, opting for sweeping choruses and cavernous arrangements, a trait that's balanced by her knack for intimate lyrical details. She deftly draws a portrait of her parents on "More Hearts Than Mine," unspools a series of poor decisions on "Bad Advice," and makes a persuasive case that the relationship on "We're Not Friends" isn't anything but a romance. These vivid tales hearken back to country tradition but
Lady Like doesn't take the genre's conventions to heart; if it's a throwback to anything, it's the overly shiny pop albums of Y2K. Unlike
Sam Hunt, who consciously expanded country's borders with his hip-hop-R&B fusions,
Andress isn't working within a chosen genre, she's making music that defies easy categorization.
Lady Like is thick with appealing contradictions -- it's grandiose yet intimate, sincere yet cinematic, slick but soulful -- and to be that dense and accessible within the course of a mere eight songs is something of an achievement, especially for a debut album. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
