Rachael Yamagata has always been a voice for the vulnerable, the wounded, and the defiant, but on her new album Starlit Alchemy she steps into an even larger role. This isn’t the torch-song siren of Happenstance or the heartbreak whisperer of Elephants…Teeth Sinking Into Heart. Instead, Yamagata returns as a guide through transformation, documenting a process of loss, surrender, resilience, and rebirth. It’s a album designed to be lived with, a cinematic arc that moves from grief to release, storm to salve, cave to starlight.

Arriving nine years after Tightrope Walker, Starlit Alchemy is the product of hard-earned independence and persistence. Yamagata has managed her career for over a decade, funding this new collection through touring, writing much of it in solitude before and during the pandemic, and recording most of it in her Catskills home studio with longtime collaborators. The result is a collection unburdened by outside pressures, shaped instead by her own clarity, setbacks, and sheer determination. “The songs started as a compulsion to just express what I was going through and witnessing,” she says. “It became a map made after the journey, not before. But it’s all in there.”

The album opens with “Backwards,” a song she had been circling for years, first imagined for a musical and now reemerging as a quiet thesis statement on the pull of transformation. “Birds” follows as both a meditation on grief and a message of hope, inspired by sudden collisions with nature and the thin veil between the living and those who’ve passed. The emotional high point comes with “Carnival,” a raw anthem about walking away from roles and situations that no longer fit, sung with the force of someone choosing liberation over expectation. By contrast, “Galaxy” drifts into cosmic contemplation, while “Somebody Like Me” strips everything back to reveal the quiet doubts that come with persistence.

Sequenced like a film soundtrack, Starlit Alchemy flows seamlessly, blending live warmth with ambient textures and orchestral swells. Yamagata calls it a “deep dive record,” meant to be heard in full, a soundtrack for what she describes as “forensics for trauma and beauty.” Its final moments leave us not with resolution but with a recognition that transformation is ongoing.

From her debut to now, Rachael Yamagata has carved a singular path, working alongside Liz Phair, Bright Eyes, Ray LaMontagne, and many others while remaining fiercely independent. With Starlit Alchemy, she distills everything she’s learned into her most intentional work yet. “If it helps move something through you—pain, grief, whatever you can’t articulate—then that’s the point,” she says. “That’s what music can do.”