GENRE; Experimental
RELEASE DATE; 10 October, 2025
RATING; 3/5
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Fendrix’s Once Upon a Time… in Shropshire is a peculiar, theatrical, and unexpectedly tender record: part pastoral folktale, part cathartic eulogy. Across ten tracks (including the six-minute opener “Beth’s Farm” and the churning “Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle”), Fendrix folds his film-composer instincts into songs that feel like mini-pageants — at times grandiose, at times raw and intimate. The album was released on 10 October 2025 and runs roughly an hour across ten songs.
What makes the album linger is its emotional spine: Fendrix wrote much of this after the sudden deaths of people close to him, and grief colors the record without sinking it into mawkishness. He balances elegy with absurdity — communal singalongs, theatrical vocal shifts, and moments of camp juxtaposed against genuinely heartbreaking lines and recordings of family voices. That tension between the performative and the private is the album’s constant refrain.
Sonically, Shropshire is restless and eclectic. Strings and choral echoes give songs like “Beth’s Farm” a chamber-pop sweep, while tracks such as “SK1” and the freestyle cut lurch into jagged, experimental territories; it’s a record that frequently surprises by switching textures mid-song. Production is ambitious but purposeful, allowing both cinematic swells and quieter, unvarnished moments to breathe.
Collaborations with film figures (a striking video for “Beth’s Farm” involves Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos) signal Fendrix’s continued cross-disciplinary reach, but the album stands on its own as a personal mythos of place — Shropshire recast as a memory palace at once bucolic and haunted. It’s not always an easy listen, but it’s consistently compelling: messy, heartfelt, and wholly alive.
If you’re drawn to music that treats grief as theatre and theatre as confession, this sophomore effort rewards close, repeated listens.
