REVIEW: Kristi Lowe - a glimpse inside my mind

I’ve been watching Kristi for a while. When you keep your finger on the pulse you start to recognise the small tells — a way of phrasing, a habitual image, a cadence that returns. This debut feels like all those little tells grown up into a full conversation. It’s not a tidy memoir. It’s not a highlight reel. It’s a set of rooms she’s asking you to enter, each one lit by something honest: grief, desire, anger, tenderness, the slow work of finding herself again.

At the heart of this record is grief and the slow practice of healing. That axis carries everything else — womanhood, love, identity — and gives those themes weight. Kristi doesn’t demand you feel what she felt; she invites you to move with her through it.

Loss sits under much of this album like a steady current. You don’t need names to feel it. On “I’m Fine.” she gives us the repeated, private rituals of absence — memorised numbers, late-night calls, the way a fantasy can “fade to black.” The line, “I could lie and say, ‘I’m fine’,” is not performative deflection so much as a survival strategy: an admission that some days you dress the wound to keep walking. Those small, domestic details are what make absence feel alive on the record. Kristi turns private habits into public tenderness.

“Medicated” is the companion to that ache. There’s a brutal clarity in the chorus — “The meds are meant to save me / But I can’t feel a thing / There’s no pill for grief” — and the song lays bare the fog that followed loss. It’s not melodramatic. It reads like testimony: the days that melt together, the attempts to be saved by others’ good intentions, and the hard realisation that numbing is not the same as healing. Together, these songs do the work of naming how grief rewires the world, her world: it changes desire, memory, even the grammar of day-to-day life.

One of the album’s strengths is how Kristi treats vulnerability like a tool, not a spectacle. She spaces phrases so you feel the thought before she finishes it. On “Glimpse Inside My Mind,” racing thoughts are rendered in breath and repetition — “I can’t sleep at night / Thoughts are running wild / Like weeds in my mind” — and the structure of the line mimics the experience. That alignment of form and feeling is a quiet, powerful craft move.

She also gives us tenderness without downplaying its complexity. “Time With You” is plain and lovely: flowers, red lipstick, the small domestic choreography of love. The simplicity of those images makes them feel earned. Joy here is not an afterthought. It’s a reclamation, a small island of rest in an otherwise restless record.

“Being a Woman” is one of the clearest pieces of cultural listening on the album. Kristi lays out the slogans and “helpful” corrections women grow up with — “Put the attitude away… You’re so much prettier when you smile” — and then quietly dismantles them. The song doesn’t preach. It simply shows how those little directives add up, how they become a performance we learn to keep. Later lines — “Slowly as we learn to see ourselves for who we are / We deconstruct the competition, work through all our scars” — gesture toward repair, toward the patient unmaking of what was taught.

That patience is the emotional posture across the record. Self-discovery is not an epiphany here; it’s an accumulation. In “Can’t Hold Me Down” she claims agency in a way that feels earned, the kind of quiet defiance that comes after years of learning you can be something other than what someone else decided for you.

Sonically the album sits comfortably between retro-soul and contemporary R&B. There are jazz-tinged phrases, bass-driven confrontations, and pop clarity that keeps the songs immediate. What stops the record from being nostalgic pastiche is the specificity of Kristi’s moments — the late-night ring tone, the breath held before saying a hard thing, the domestic image of flowers and lipstick. Those concrete details root the throwback textures in present feeling.

The production mostly serves the songs. It’s warm and clear, and it gives space to Kristi’s voice, which is the album’s anchor. If anything, I kept returning to how much the record trusts restraint: silences function like punctuation, and phrasing matters more than flashy ornamentation. That restraint makes each line land.

The sequencing of the album also plays a crucial part in the overall experience. Going from “I’m Fine.” into “Medicated” and letting the two songs sit together… hearing how absence and numbness refuse tidy resolution. Then moving into “Can’t Hold Me Down” and “Being a Woman” to feel the shift from survival to reclamation. Continue down the tracklist, and by the end you notice how tenderness arrives not as an escape but as repair.

This is a debut that wears its wounds honestly and still invites light. Kristi Lowe’s record teaches a grammar of surviving: sometimes you lie to get through the day, sometimes you sit with the pain until it loosens its hold, sometimes you find joy in small, stubborn places. It’s not a finished map. It’s a mirror, a glimpse, and it wants you to see the world she’s learning to live inside. I’m listening, and I think you should too.