The instrumental opening to Fixer is already breathtakingly beautiful. And then Elanor Moss begins to sing. Once again, Moss’s voice is clear and pure and transporting; timeless and elegant, her vocal performance is utterly absorbing. Musical depths are created by Matthew Herd’s saxophone, Marcus Hamblett’s flugelhorn and Jools Owen’s tenor horn. Graceful strings rise dreamily over these layers: Reid Jenkins adds fiddle and Andrew Stuart-Buttle delivers violin. The combination of instruments alongside Moss’s striking, ranging vocal melody results in a gorgeous composition.
There’s real poetry in Moss’s lyrics, through which she explores the complexities of relationships: “Somewhere, deep down // I’m afraid that if you show me the knife // I might use it on you babe…The thought comes // Fully formed // That maybe what we thought of as a knife // Is just a needle we could use // To stitch the wound?” Indeed, love is capable of both causing harm and healing.
Moss explains the song’s themes: “Fixer is a song about vulnerability, that double-edged sword. It came to me first as this image of how when you love someone it’s like you are a little animal, rolling over and showing your little white belly, exposed and endangered to the power of the other. Everyone has their own particular vulnerabilities, and when you love someone, you have to show them; you put that power in their hands. That’s scary. They could hurt you. But that exposed place, that vulnerability, can also be a doorway into something else, some kind of healing. This is the song where the album title comes from.”
Fixer is taken from the album The Knife, The Needle, due out today, 21st August 2026, on Merge Records. Across the songs on the album, Moss uses her dark, psych-folk narratives to explore the ways that love changes and complicates relationships. Beautifully crafted music; immersive and absorbing. Check it out.
