Supported by the Filharmonie Brno, Dennis Russell Davies and an ensemble featuring Anohni, Rob Moose and Marc Ribot, Amelia is the first album of new material from Laurie Anderson since Landfall in 2018, and her first since receiving the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. The record unfolds across twenty-two short pieces that collectively tell the story of Amelia Earhart’s final, ill-fated flight, tracing her attempt to circumnavigate the globe and the moment when her plane vanished without a trace over the Pacific. Earhart, a passionate pioneer of aviation, became world-famous as the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic in 1932; five years later she set out to fly around the world, only to disappear before she could complete the journey. Anderson notes that “the words used in Amelia are inspired by her pilot’s logs, the telegrams she wrote to her husband, and my idea of what a woman flying around the world might be thinking,” fusing archival fragments and imaginative projection into a single narrative flow.

Amelia brings Anderson back to the narrative-album form with a subject that has haunted American modernity for nearly a century. Conceived as a compact suite, it condenses a vast voyage into a chain of crystalline scenes, leaping from runway to cloudbank, cockpit interior to radio static, official report to private reverie. Rather than reconstruct the mystery in forensic detail, Anderson stages Earhart’s flight as a flickering interior cinema, precise in its geography yet dreamlike in its sense of time, so that each new waypoint feels like another station in a slowly unfolding myth. The language moves between clipped technical notations and almost childlike wonder, capturing both the repetitive labour of navigation and the vertigo of looking down at a world reduced to lines on a map and distant points of light.

Musically, Amelia sits at the confluence of several of Anderson’s long-running currents: the minimalist electronics and processed violins of Big Science, the chamber intimacy and storytelling of Life on a String, the environmental sweep and storm-thinking of Landfall. Short cues function like illuminated index cards - tiny markers of altitude changes, course corrections, or fleeting thoughts - while longer pieces stretch into suspended nocturnes in which the Filharmonie Brno’s strings slide between Morricone-like lyricism and glacial, sustained harmonies. Percussion and electronics suggest shifts in pressure and engine noise more than fixed grooves; Anderson’s voice, sometimes close and conversational, sometimes processed into distant announcements, keeps slipping between narrator, co-pilot and ghost, while Anohni’s appearances add a second, haunted register of song, as if another era were singing alongside Earhart from just beyond the horizon.