“Are you busy Saturday morning? / I’ve got thousands of things to tell you / Like how I’ve started making plans to replace you / With one perfect song that goes on and on.”
The opening verse to Saturday Morning gives a good introduction of what to expect from True, the debut album from Tenderness, the solo project of Katy Beth Young of Peggy Sue and Deep Throat Choir. It has a velvet glove delivery, gentle but with a sideways swipe. The ten songs were borne of difficult circumstances: the death of her father, a break-up, the pandemic and a cancelled tour, all of which makes it understandable that the record tends toward the melancholy. With pedal steel, courtesy of Harry Boahy, to the fore, there is a spare, countryish feel that wears the influence of classic figures like Patsy Cline and Kris Kristofferson lightly, although Young’s voice is most reminiscent of the more contemporary Laura Cantrell and Caitlin Rose in its sharp ache.
Throughout the album, moods are likely to be subject to fluctuations of the nothing good lasts variety as illustrated by The Salt Flat’s chorus of “I got a good feeling / but it was gone by the evening.” There is a sense of anxiety reflected in lines like “One week of silence / and one day of talking with our hands.”
Fortunately, the title track is unconnected with Spandau Ballet’s sloppy abomination of the same name. Incidentally, at the risk of digressing, it has to be said that Tony Hadley has the most tonally horrible, foghorn voice of any singer in the history of popular music. In contrast, Young’s song is less sentimental and more clear-eyed. In contemplating whether love is true, it has a chorus asserting that “nobody’s love is that good / all the time.” Its final verse recognises, “he turns me into a memory / even before I am out of the room.”
Originally, Young considered naming the album Touchscreen and that particular song reflects a theme running through the songs of how modern dating is conducted through the medium of video screens, text messages and algorithms, as well as the performative nature of love. It is telling that her voice dips in embarrassment as she sings “you can pretend that you’re pretending / and I can pretend that I am not.” When Young returns to the theme on Database Blues, she realises that because so much information about her taste has been stored “I cannot call it fate / when it plays our song” and later “I put you on mute like the TV set”. It is song with a devastating clarity.
We’ll Always Have Paris 1919 is more dynamic having an indie rock sound, feedback echoes and lush harmonies on a chorus that is riddled with self-doubt (“marry me but not tonight / give me time to change your mind.”) Peacetime is set on the final day on earth and is understandably devasting. Whilst others are thanking gods for video calls, the narrator is realising that all the years practice of being far apart has been of no benefit. The way that the pedal steel brushes against slowcore guitar chords before strings and synths fill out the sound makes for a moving conclusion.
Being an impressionistic collage of images, Day of Atonement is a bit of an outlier. There is still an understated brutality to its opening couplet (“Milk on the stove / Hot as my temper”) but the song is a dreamy haze with some eery backing vocals from the Deep Throat Choir. With its boiling atmosphere, Heat Wave Long Song is probably the album’s most memorable song and Young’s voice is at its sharpest. It captures the stifling nature of love and its fears, jealousies and infidelities. True ends minimally with Playing ‘Country Roads’, sparse guitar picking and whispers of pedal steel drone, Young’s voice a murmur as she curses the songs she will never play for her father, questioning “why they all gotta sound so sad.” It makes for an impressive demonstration of how less is more.
True is an album for diving down into a bourbon bottle and ruefully reflecting on what went wrong. Like all the best country influenced music, it confronts those moments where life can feel especially cruel but does so in an empathetic way. Young’s voice has an ideal balance between sweet and sour while the instrumentation is perfectly understated to enhance the atmosphere. All these factors mean it would be wise to try a little Tenderness.
Tenderness: True – Out 13 March 2026 (Amorphous Sounds)
– The Salt Flats [Official Video]
I was editor of the long-running fanzine, Plane Truth, and have subsequently written for a number of publications. While the zine was known for championing the most angular independent sounds, performing in recent years with a community samba percussion band helped to broaden my tastes so that in 2021 I am far more likely to be celebrating an eclectic mix of sounds and enthusing about Made Kuti, Anthony Joseph, Little Simz and the Soul Jazz Cuban compilations as well as Pom Poko and Richard Dawson.
