Moving from Seattle to Los Angeles and now based in the UK, Alina Ly’s musical career first arrived in 2018, soon selling out her first headline show in Manchester. In 2020, she embarked on a hiatus, giving herself time to develop her songwriting and hone her artistic development. Now, for the first time in four years, audiences get to witness a new release from Alina Ly, as she unveils a live version of fan favourite track ‘Keep Me Warm’.
Effortlessly re-igniting the excitement around her songwriting, Alina lets her melodies do the talking. The warmth of electric guitar arpeggios subtly grows a soft atmosphere, a garden in which her vocals are beautiful flowers. New instrumentation arrives, gentle bass tones, impactful keys and a breezy shaker. These all feed into the overarching narrative of love that Alina creates, as her lyrics explain emotions, her performance evokes them, spellbinding the listener with the ease of her natural talent.
Taking a deeper dive into the single as Alina returns to music, the artist shares, “I wrote Keep Me Warm with my guitarist, Jake Stentiford. It was our first co-write that came about one spontaneous evening, sat around in my room noodling away on our guitars. Jake came up with this beautiful guitar part that became the foundation for what I spent the rest of the night writing to, which I suppose is sort of a letter I wrote to myself at the time. For me, this song is a message about persevering through darkness, and the remembrance that we still carry light and warmth within ourselves through it all.
It’s a special song to us both because of the journey of its creation and the support we had releasing it. I went on a hiatus after that to start thinking about an album, and that took its own journey in itself as well. I went from one end to the other and almost didn’t come out of it, but a lot has been simmering and I’ve now got multiple records in the making that I hadn’t imagined possible. Before introducing any of it though, it felt right to pick back up where we left off. We never got the chance to do a live video for Keep Me Warm as planned, so to be able to do it now, in a new light and introducing this space that I’ve spent all this time in feeling, grieving, writing, and recording these records in means everything to me.”
With a new album on the horizon now she has made her return, Alina Ly immediately has a one-to-watch status, with music that is beautifully thoughtful at every turn.
Watch the video below:
