The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter Avery Lynch lands a light gut-punch on her latest single "Sweetheart," full of warmth, tenderness, and self-reckoning. The song is the last taste before her forthcoming EP, out this September, and suffice it to say she's saving the most tender for last. Seated in the Adult Contemporary and commercial singer-songwriter pocket, it's not a shouty record. "Sweetheart' speaks softly, and it speaks deeply.
Lynch allows us to enter the quiet, transformative moments of a fresh love, the type that turns old definitions on their head. And with every breathy note and reflective lyric, she rubs off layer and layer of emotional armor that she's built up since those earlier scuffings. "Sweetheart reflects on the early days of my relationship and how quickly I realized that what I'd accepted in the past wasn't love," Avery explains. That is the song's beating heart. It's a softly radical change in self-perception. Acts like walking a person home, asking follow-up questions, and wanting someone by your side, things that should be considered standard, suddenly feel monumental when a person's understanding of love has been twisted by past toxicity.
There's a raw, diary-like intimacy to the storytelling, and that may be because this one came straight from the heart. Written with her boyfriend, Jordan, and her best friend, Neisha Grace, and produced by Jordan, "Sweetheart" shares the close-knit yet substantial energy of something intimate. This is love, at its most restorative. You can hear it in the album's production, which is a bit insistent, if not heavy-handed in places, but is otherwise subtle and meticulous, leaving space for Avery's voice to slide around in, like curlicues for him to navigate, much like the line of a letter in cursive.
Lynch offers you a quiet kind of hope that whatever we mistook for love, it doesn't have to be the word we leave as our conclusion. With anticipation building for her new EP, the track serves as both a closing and an opening. It's the end of settling for less and the beginning of something more honest, more whole, and ultimately, more worthy. Avery Lynch has never sounded more convinced of herself. And in "Sweetheart," she makes the case that tenderness can prove just as strong a motivator, emphasizing that occasionally the smallest gestures will save us.
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