“Great Pretender” - Fore Fader
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
There are albums that play like a soundtrack to your life — and then there are albums that feel like a séance. Great Pretender, the debut full-length from Los Angeles duo Fore Fader (Stephanie Carlin and Carey Clayton), belongs firmly in the latter category. It’s not just a collection of songs; it’s a spiritual excavation — a raw, shimmering encounter with mortality, self-deception, and the divine.
Recorded live between the desolate beauty of Joshua Tree National Park and the lush expanse of the Los Padres Forest, Great Pretender breathes with a sense of place — you can almost hear the air move through it. The album unfolds like a ritual under the desert moon: reverent, cinematic, and hypnotically alive. Each song feels like a prayer murmured into a canyon, echoing back with an answer you weren’t expecting.
Musically, Fore Fader exists in the liminal space between Florence + The Machine’s spiritual intensity and Massive Attack’s immersive electronica. There’s a devotional quality to the arrangements — pulsing synths that rise like incense smoke, percussion that feels ceremonial, and Carlin’s voice, which can shift from whisper to wail without ever losing its sense of truth. It’s a voice that sounds as if it’s been through something — and come back changed.
At its core, Great Pretender is an album about truth and illusion — about how we learn to survive by pretending, and what happens when those masks start to slip. The title track, born out of the duo’s vigil during a loved one’s life-or-death surgery, captures that existential fragility in devastating fashion. “We wrote Great Pretender while someone we love was in the operating room,” Carlin explains. “That song became a mirror — a reminder that we all kinda coast, playing pretend until something shakes us awake.”
Other standouts include The Rains, where tribal percussion collides with celestial harmonies, and All I Ever, a slow-burning confession that feels half pop song, half benediction. There’s a thread of mysticism running through the entire album — not in a performative way, but as a genuine grappling with faith, surrender, and the soul’s stubborn longing to know. “It’s about the moments I lie to myself versus the ones where I’m finally clear enough to tell the truth,” Carlin says. “But it’s also an homage to God — to the infinite intelligence that holds it all.”
Photo Credit: Artist EPK
Fore Fader manages to make this tension — between the human and the divine, the broken and the beautiful — sound utterly seamless. The production is both minimalist and lush, with each sonic detail placed like an offering. There’s a strange peace in its darkness, a sense that even the ache has purpose.
If Great Pretender feels like a revelation, it’s because it refuses to settle for half-truths. It’s music for those standing on the edge of awakening — unsure what’s next, but brave enough to keep listening.
Fore Fader’s Great Pretender is a transcendent debut — a cinematic, soul-baring exploration of illusion, faith, and awakening. It’s as haunting as it is healing, fusing desert-born ambience with ethereal production and devotional pop intensity.
“Great Pretender” is available now on all major streaming platforms
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