Kent singer-songwriter Lily Madison has built her sound on honesty, and her new single ‘This Is It’ is the clearest example yet of what that looks like in practice.
The track takes its shape from a moment most people will recognise: working up the courage to tell someone how you feel, without knowing what happens next. Madison has described the title as holding two possibilities at once, either everything falling into place exactly as hoped, or the risk not paying off at all. That tension runs through the whole song, giving it an emotional honesty that feels lived-in rather than performed.
‘This Is It’ pulls from the female-fronted soft rock of the 90s that Madison counts among her biggest influences; The Sundays, The Cranberries and Fleetwood Mac chief among them. She’s spoken about studying The Sundays’ chord work closely while writing, trying to understand what made that sound resonate with her so strongly before folding pieces of it into her own material. The result sits somewhere between melancholy and hope, built on guitars, bass, drums and tambourine, and carried by a vocal that never overreaches for effect.
Lily Madison’s musical roots go back further than this single suggests. Immersed in her local gig scene from a young age, she’s spoken about the community around those shows shaping both her confidence and her sound, and about wanting her music to be a space where honesty and vulnerability come first. That ethos carries through everything she’s released so far, and ‘This Is It’ continues it.
The single also marks a step forward in a wider run of new material. Madison has further releases planned in the coming months, including a forthcoming EP that builds on the sound established here, layering the same emotional candour across a fuller body of work. For a young artist so clearly finding her voice in real time, ‘This Is It’ feels like exactly the right introduction to what’s coming next.