Navigating the Storm: feeo’s Goodness within AD93’s Experimental Legacy

feeo (aka Theodora Laird) emerges from South London’s fertile experimental scene with her debut album Goodness, released by AD93. Over the past decade, AD93, an offshoot of Young Turks, itself born from XL Recordings, has gently become one of the most ruthless laboratories for experimental sound. Its catalogue has expanded rapidly, and in the past year alone, the label has dropped 25 records that tug at noise, ambient, post-punk, free improvisation, and whatever else slips through the cracks. To name just a few: YHWH Nailgun’s 45 Pounds thrashed minimalism into abrasion; Moin’s Belly Up carved polyrhythms into noise rock, accentuated by Ben Vince’s saxophones as Sophia Al-Maria, a previous collaborator, returned with conscious spoken word. Meanwhile, Valentina Magaletti moved from Moin’s drum kits into sprawling solo work alongside Japan’s Koshiro Hino in his YPY project, while James K used electronic surgical precision to sculpt a melancholic pop wonder.

Goodness asserts itself within this context, and feeo’s care for it is clear; every drone, synth and word perfectly placed, carried effortlessly and instinctively. It reminds us that beauty and ruin have always spoken the same language, and of our own fragmented hopefulness surrounding uncertain futures. Upon first and quite a few more listens, this album pulls me beyond myself, into a space where human experience slips into other worlds: the natural, the mythic, the nonhuman; and I float somewhere in between. It feels both intimate and endlessly expansive.

In the opening track, “Days Pt. 1”, high-pitched drones and visceral throbs intertwine as Laird’s father, actor Trevor Laird, narrates a disquieting vision: “Awful things happen every day to people who don’t deserve it,” as “pianos fall on the heads of infinite strangers, in infinite cities, in infinite parallel universes … from the roof terraces of disused opera houses,” while “passengers gaze out of the windows of a moving train”. The result is an absurdist apocalypse; a slow-motion catastrophe governed entirely by luck. The track eventually jolts into motion as steady kick drums take over, become a stand-in for stability itself. To me, this unexpected turn reflects the relentless self-interest that drives everything forward: reminding us of the world that always sustains its motion even as it comes undone.

Laird then moves us beyond the disordered urban in “The Mountain”, where human concerns suddenly feel negligible, as she creates a stillness that reminds us of forces larger than ourselves. Here, a new, muffled steady pulse recalls geological phenomena - the laminar flow of molten magma. The mountain, personified as a feminine figure, registers as “heavy, hot, and hungry”, capable of both giving life and taking it away. The track alludes to the dualism humanity have historically drawn between “nature” and “human” and feeo dismantles this. “The Mountain” carries the calm weight of nature – an indifferent power that exceeds us while we remain inseparable from our own impermanence and decay.

The 05:59 track “Requium” guides the listener inward, into a space where the mind eases and the body remember itself. Synths curl around feeo’s voice, trailing her statement, “From my ribs she’ll grow black roses”, extending feminisation from mountains towards the non-human night, who forgives us, even when we feel unforgivable. When she pleads, “Bury me, bury me in the garden,” minimalist percussion and the repetitive looping structures, create a space of surrender.

“The Last Great Storm”, is a brief interlude filled with the static and distant hum of a disconnected telephone line. “Minutes before nuclear war, all the animals in the city came out from parks and behind walls and sat in the road bowing to surrender,” the bleakest possible emotional horizon. Yet it is this vision that introduces album’s centrepiece, “Win!.” Here, Laird’s voice splits and widens, scattering across the fractured electronics as she intones, “We can figure this out, it’s not over yet.” - a refusal to accept the inevitability sketched in the interlude. Her production presses in behind her, compressing and muffling layers of sound until her final words - “and your blood was my blood.” This moment spoke to me as a meditation on self-dissolution as Laird figures survival of the storm not as individual endurance, yet collective feeling.

“Sandpit” pares things down to piano and Laird’s voice, now softer and fragile, floats over a looping electric guitar figure and harmonic haze. When she sings, “another day turns, I think we should leave the city,” she carries the weight of lived experience with her - the ambivalence of belonging in a place that has shaped you completely and the pull to move on from its relentless pressures.

“Days Pt. 2”, again narrated by Trevor Laird continues the album’s exploration of cosmic absurdity and human fragility, yet with a twisted mocking edge “good things happen every day to people who don’t deserve it… infinite landlords receive infinite kisses from infinite wives in infinite universes”.

After stillness in “The Hammer Strikes the Bell” and cyclical returns to key themes of mythic themes and the liminal boundaries between worlds in “Night Forgives Those Black as Her,” my favourite song was saved for last: “There Is No I.” The song opens a space of release and lines such as “You keep the darkness from my door, and I watch the light keep burning bright behind yours”, remind us how love and the light we cling to, can sustain and protect us, even when the burning world looms larger.

The most recent AD93 release by Alpha Maid continues this lineage of experimentation, highlighting how women and nonbinary artists, and the scenes appearing in London’s underground, are not only reshaping music yet the politics of identity, embodiment, and subjectivity.