Technically excellent but emotionally bereft album from Gulf Coast female trio.
Catching up on If You Only Knew, released by all-female trio The Krickets in October 2025, is like being battered with the world’s softest pillow. Everything is pleasant, familiar, and technically well put together, but it fails to really land a blow.
On paper, it should work. The trio’s hallmark three-part harmonies are consistently excellent, often the best element in any given track. The vocal interplay is consistently great, often brilliant, and yet it’s frequently quite dull. They smooth everything out when what’s needed is a bit of friction.
The album leans heavily into a soft-focus Americana built around love in all its forms. Every track circles that theme throughout with song titles: Right In Front of Me, Holding On, If You Only Knew, What Do You Know About Love… You know what’s coming from the first chord, the musical equivalent of a Jennifer Aniston film.
Lyrics feel less like observations and more like placeholders; sentiments that drift by without ever really saying anything specific or memorable. It’s just relentlessly safe. Musically, there are layers of cello, organ and guitar, but again, restraint is the overriding approach.
Worst of all, Let Me Be features a totally out-of-place guitar solo crowbarred in. It’s the kind of moment that should inject energy, and at least make a change from the usual plucked strings approach, but it feels wildly out of place, like C. C. DeVille stumbling into a The Chicks session. It’s not bold so much as confused, a rare attempt at excess in an album otherwise committed to playing it safe.
What makes If You Only Knew mildly frustrating rather than outright forgettable is that the ingredients are clearly there. The vocal blend is strong, the musicianship is polished, and the production is warm without being overbearing. The band themselves emphasise authenticity and lived experience in their songwriting, but the album settles into a kind of emotional middle ground: earnest but vague, polished but predictable.
There’s a version of this band, one that leans harder into those harmonies, takes more lyrical risks, and isn’t afraid to disrupt its own sound, that could be genuinely compelling. This just isn’t it.
