Irene Wilde – Spleen (Narrator’s Edition) (Album Review)

Irene Wilde’s Spleen (Narrator’s Edition) is not just a collection of songs, it’s a searing, diaristic excavation of a mind burdened by beauty, chaos, and deep emotional intelligence. As the second part of her conceptual trilogy The Blackest Bile, Spleen moves with the raw, vulnerable cadence of someone giving the listener full access to their internal monologue. It’s more than an album; it’s a narrated confessional wrapped in haunting production, poetic interludes, and experimental soundscapes that lean into the ethos of being seen, especially when it feels unbearable.

The record opens with 988, which is a lifeline. Wilde doesn’t tiptoe into her themes; she drops the listener directly into the gravity of mental health discourse, urging care and compassion before a single note is sung. It’s an invocation, a dedication, and a forewarning that this album will feel like something. What follows isn’t always comfortable, but that discomfort is part of its mission.

Wilde leans into spoken-word throughout the project, most notably in pieces like The Loneliness of Madness (I Now Give You Permission to Grieve) and Do You Regret Being An Artist, where the boundaries between slam poetry and sonic experimentation dissolve. These tracks are unsettling by design; echoes distort, voices warble, and instrumental builds mimic the internal escalation of panic or despair. They don’t ask to be liked; they ask to be understood, to be felt.

When the singing begins on A Healthy Dose, there’s a jolt where Wilde’s vocals are lush, eerie, and filled with frenetic emotional energy reminiscent of Ethel Cain or Lorde, but entirely her own. The track layers haunting background vocals that crowd the sonic space like a mind bursting with intrusive thoughts. It’s vividly evocative of Wilde’s attempt to artistically render bipolarity.

Blue Leaves furthers this, her voice climbing and dropping with a delicate, almost collapsing grace, mirroring emotional instability and the push-pull of healing. Though at times rushed, the urgency suits the subject matter. Life, especially life with mental illness, rarely waits for perfect tempo.

There’s something gothic and unflinching in Heartbeat, a stripped-back composition that lets Wilde’s vocal performance dominate. The track’s somewhere between Fiona Apple’s brutal honesty and a lonely prayer, and it speaks to the self-awareness of illness: recognising your own mind as both source and saboteur. Similarly, Angry is messy and visceral, the vocals off-key and emotion-led, the song pulsates like an anxious tick. It’s not clean. It’s not polished. And that’s its power.

Across the album, Wilde plays with distortion and dissonance as emotional tools. On Build Me Up, the crowded, cacophonous instrumental threatens to drown her out entirely, which is a risk, but also a thematic win. It reflects what it means to try and rebuild when the world (and your brain) refuses to give you a quiet space to do so.

Cigarette Burns takes a more experimental turn, continuing the theme of inner pain physically manifesting in metaphor, her thoughts burning like fire on flesh. Mouth Full of Daggers and Tired are both vocally mournful, moments of internal severance and fatigue that echo the reality of isolation through mental illness.

The emotional centre, though, might be Clever, Mad (Mad Woman). Here, Wilde explicitly narrates her relationship with her diagnosis, not as a victim, but as a woman demonised not for her disorder but for her intellect. This isn’t just autobiography; it’s reclamation. She crafts a mythos of a madwoman whose true threat lies not in her instability, but in her clarity. It’s one of the few moments where the voice doesn’t shake, and instead, it strikes.

Chicagoland emerges as the album’s most structurally cohesive track, where vocal and instrumental finally fuse in harmony. It doesn’t sacrifice emotion for production; instead, it proves what Wilde can achieve when she chooses sonic balance. But that restraint is short-lived. The album drifts again into the abstract with No Feeling is Final, a meditation that moves from soft reflection into soft chaos, and then Baby, Please, a slow-burning plea that crescendos and recedes like emotional relapse.

She closes with We Made It Through The Night, not as a triumph but as a reckoning. The song’s inclusion of Amazing Grace is not ironic, it’s defiant. It reclaims religious imagery not to promise salvation, but to acknowledge the fragile miracle of simply making it through. The whispered poetry layered over soft percussion is no benediction; it’s an exhausted exhale. We survived. Barely. But we did.

SCORE/Good – Spleen (Narrator’s Edition) doesn’t demand passive listening. It insists on participation. Wilde’s voice, which is sometimes immaculate and sometimes imperfect, swims against production that can feel overbearing or sparse, but always emotionally resonant. Some tracks blur into each other, and not all work on a musical level alone. But that may be the point. As a narrative work, Spleen is a performance piece. A documentation. A therapeutic howl. It’s not easy listening. It’s not meant to be. But it is necessary.

[We rank singles, EPs, and albums on a scale of Poor, Mediocre, Good, Excellent, and Outstanding]

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