Bryony Sier – Who Am I
After years of performing at festivals such as Nozstock, Brecon Jazz and Swn, as a support act for names like Molly Tuttle, Joshua Radin and Rachel Baiman, and following her international debut in Madrid at the beginning of 2026, Bryony Sier’s first album is not a surprise but a logical next step. The 29-year-old singer-songwriter and guitarist from South Wales has taken her time. She worked together with producer Charlie Francis and songwriter Amy Wadge while building a live career that most artists would struggle to match. “Who Am I” is the result of all those years, across nine songs.
The album moves at the intersection of folk, blues, soul and pop. That may sound like a commonly used description, but in Sier’s case, it genuinely fits: there is country in the guitar playing, gospel in the way she finishes a line, and enough pop to keep the songs accessible without making them superficial. The finger-picking style she taught herself as a teenager through YouTube still forms the framework, but the arrangements now breathe with more space and confidence than on her earlier EP “Personal Monster”. From a production standpoint, the album is restrained: acoustic textures remain at the forefront, with subtle layers supporting the lyrics without overpowering them. Sier’s voice, rough and tender at the same time, does the rest.
“Telephone” and “Let’s Talk” show that she writes just as well about the outside world as she does about herself. “Brand New” has a freshness and openness that works well beside the heavier songs. “Til We Grow Old” is the kind of song you already know after hearing it once, not because it is simple, but because it lands exactly where it should. Then there is “Platform 8”, the track that gives the album its weight. The song is rooted in her experiences with bullying and the feeling of literally being silenced as a teenager. Lines such as ‘I’m not an object on your shelf’ do not sound like a statement but like something that remained unspoken for a long time and is finally being said. That is the difference between writing about something and writing from something, and Sier almost always does the latter.
Not every song reaches that level. “Payday” and “Why Do I Matter” are thematically interesting but lack the sharpness and focus of the stronger tracks. The songwriting is solid, but the space Sier creates elsewhere feels slightly more restricted here. These are songs that, on a second album, would probably no longer be the weaker moments, but here they stand out slightly more because the rest is so strong.
“Who Am I” closes with “XOXO”, and that title says something about how Sier approaches her work: direct, personal, without distance. She does not ask herself the title question as part of a crisis, but as someone already beginning to formulate the answer. For listeners familiar with artists such as Lucy Rose, Lizzy McAlpine or the more acoustic side of Laura Marling, this is an album that convinces, and a debut that creates curiosity about what is still to come. (7/10) (Independent release)
