Album Review & Artist Profile
The Lighthouse
Tessa Rose Jackson
A Voice That Found Its Name
Tessa Rose Jackson — born 22 August 1992 in London — is a Dutch-British singer, songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist and visual artist. Few artists navigate the space between indie folk and cinematic composition with the same fluency, yet Jackson has quietly done so for over a decade, working across records, screen, and stage with remarkable range.
She released her first album, (Songs From) The Sandbox, in 2013 under her own name before adopting the moniker Someone from 2017 onwards — a pseudonym that afforded her creative freedom while she developed her craft. Under that alias she released several acclaimed records, including the cult favourite Owls, and built a reputation for beguiling, layered songwriting that drew comparisons to Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Nick Drake.
Alongside her solo work, Jackson has forged a significant career as a film and television composer. Her screen credits include the true-crime drama De Sneeuwman (winner of a Buma Music In Media Award for Best Score), the animated feature Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish, and five original songs for the widely anticipated video game Life Is Strange: Double Exposure (2024). She also contributed vocals to the 2018 feature Terminal, starring Margot Robbie and Simon Pegg, and co-scored The Phantom Carriage, performed live with the Dutch Metropole Orchestra.
Based between Amsterdam and London, Jackson works from a home studio furnished with an extensive collection of vintage guitars and synthesisers, and maintains a dedicated space at the iconic Metropolis Studios in London. It is this dual world — the intimacy of a home and the grandeur of a professional studio — that lends her music its unique combination of tenderness and orchestral ambition.
By 2024, the Someone chapter was complete. "It did its work," she reflects. "It allowed me to develop in my own artistry without too much outside pressure. I feel like it did its job now, and I can go back to my own name." That return is marked, with no small amount of courage, by The Lighthouse.
"I could see the album before it was made. I knew the world I wanted it to live in — a slightly more out-of-time world, a little bit of ghostly folklore."
— Tessa Rose Jackson
Beacons in the Dark
Written in a family home in France beside what Jackson calls "a brilliantly spooky graveyard," The Lighthouse is, on the surface, an album about death. But that description does it a profound disservice. This is a record in which mortality becomes the lens through which life is examined with greater clarity, warmth and even joy — a distinction Jackson herself is careful to draw.
The twelve-track set opens with its title piece: rich, picked-out guitar chords ebb like tide, and Jackson's voice enters close and brooding, heavy with the suggestion of long absence. The recurring refrain — I've been away — frames the album's central preoccupation: a homecoming. Emotionally, sonically, existentially. The imagery of the lighthouse as a beacon calling a lost sailor back to the living world is as elegantly conceived as it is executed.
From there, the album unfolds with remarkable thematic and sonic range. "The Man Who Wasn't There" carries a beautifully unsettling acoustic tension, its bold refrain ("I'm not carrying that again") reinforced by sonorous male backing vocals and a dramatic cello motif. "The Bricks That Make The Building" reaches back through generations, brushed harp and ghostlike harmonies mapping the spirit of ancestry. "Dawn" is contrastingly quirky, pure and light. "Built To Collide" — a recent single — lands somewhere between coming-of-age folk and defiant self-affirmation, its introspective lyricism ("Sometimes the best you've got is just making do with what you're given") delivered with Jackson's characteristic gentle conviction.
The album's emotional centrepiece arrives with "Fear Bangs the Drum." What begins as a meditation on anxiety — Jackson has spoken candidly about being a "quite fearful person" — erupts into one of the record's most celebratory moments, a joyful brass-fuelled catharsis that transforms dread into release. The Guardian awarded the album four stars and singled out this track; it is not difficult to understand why.
"Grace Notes" is perhaps the most ravishing moment: finger-strummed guitar and sparse piano chords that would sit comfortably on a Nick Drake record, an impression of delicate perfection from a songwriter who clearly knows exactly when to say less. The closing "Prizefighter" arrives like the slow exhale of a long breath held: reflective, quietly resolved, and deeply moving.
Produced by Jackson alongside collaborator Darius Timmer and recorded at Shorebreaker Studios, the album is immaculately constructed. String arrangements by Sam Rowe lend weight and sweep; the rhythm section of Dan Huijser and Dave Wismeijer provide a bass warmth that, as one early listener noted, "jumps out of the speakers in a way that warms the whole musical experience." Mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, the sound is rich, dynamic and beautifully spatial.
What separates The Lighthouse from its folk-adjacent contemporaries is Jackson's instinctively cinematic intelligence — a quality earned, no doubt, through years of composing for screen. Every track feels considered not just as a song but as a scene, and the album as a whole has the satisfying architecture of a film that knows exactly where it is going.
"This is an immensely atmospheric piece of music, heavy with expectation and so delicately and meticulously crafted that the sounds are close to tangible."
— Clash MagazineFear Bangs The Drum
Built To Collide
Full Tracklist
- The Lighthouse
- The Man Who Wasn't There
- The Bricks That Make The Building
- Dawn
- Built To Collide
- Gently Now
- When Your Time Comes
- Fear Bangs The Drum
- By Morning
- Grace Notes
- Wild Geese
- Prizefighter
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