Jessie Altman Treats Love as a Process on ‘Lovelight’

A second album tends to reveal whether the first one was a fluke. Jessie Altman answers that question on Lovelight, out September 25: twelve tracks built with Sam Hollander, a producer whose credits run through Panic! At The Disco’s “High Hopes,” Fitz and the Tantrums’ “HandClap” and Train’s “Marry Me.”

The pairing is logical. Hollander works in hooks and clean melodic frames; Altman works in specifics — the false start, the memory that refuses to fade, the bad decision that felt like chemistry at the time. Lovelight gives those stories a wider arrangement without burying the voice carrying them.

Altman has described the record as her first attempt at writing about what love should feel like, following a debut concerned with loss and its aftermath. She calls the new material more pop than before, placed “in that space between grounded and dreaming.”

Sequencing carries the argument. “Endlessly” opens inside something already finished. “Indifference” and “Your Own Good” locate the moment caring simply stops, which is less dramatic and harder to write than heartbreak. Later, “Barcelona” and “Play It Cool” brighten as the narrator does. “Wanted” drops the self-protection.

Moving on happens in stages here, not in one turn, and the album is structured to make you notice the difference.