Spring has officially begun and is hopefully here to stay despite the sporadic weather. If you want your music to match the blossoming weather outside, here are five albums that remind me of spring.
“MOSS” by Maya Hawke (2022)
You’ve probably heard of Hawke from her acting career or famous parents, Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, but if you haven’t given her music a listen, I highly recommend it.
Released in 2022, “MOSS” is my favorite album of hers and every time I listen to it, no matter the time of year, it always transports me to spring. The album reflects a lot on childhood and adolescence, filling it with a youthful and nostalgic sound that makes me feel warm inside.
Some of my favorite tracks on the album include “Hiatus,” “Luna Moth,” “South Elroy” and “Thérèse,” but the whole album works together really well to paint a picture of Hawke’s coming of age.
“Older” by Lizzy McAlpine (2024)
This is my favorite album of all time. To me, it really encapsulates the sadder aspects of spring. While other albums on this list may be reminiscent of the flowers blooming and the sun shining, this one is for the rainy days. As a lover of depressing music, I adore it.
The album is deep and uses the theme of cycles as it recounts feeling stuck in a loveless relationship. I love McAlpine’s writing because it is at once very simple but also incredibly profound and visceral. I literally cannot listen to the song “Older” without crying because it encapsulates the feeling of being stuck in harmful cycles so well.
Even though I’ve never experienced the situation that inspired this album, I still find a way to relate to all of the songs. While the album is genuinely devastating, there is a strong sense of hope by the end that we can eventually break out of the seemingly never-ending cycles that harm us, highlighted in the songs “Better Than This” and “Vortex.”
Though the deluxe version of the album, “Older (and Wiser)” really propelled McAlpine’s career forward with the songs “Spring into Summer” and “Pushing It Down and Praying,” if you’ve never listened to the original album in its entirety, I highly recommend giving it a chance.
“Unreal Unearth” by Hozier (2023)
Hozier’s most recent album is a good mix of depressing and upbeat, which I think is a pretty good depiction of spring.
The album is based on Dante’s “Inferno,” with each song representing a different circle of hell. I don’t know too much about Dante’s “Inferno,” but the inspiration makes the album feel like a poetic Greek myth which, as a fan of the Broadway musical “Hadestown,” I love. There is also a big focus on nature throughout the album, which is another reason it reminds me of spring.
This album has some of my favorite songs of all time, including “Unknown/Nth,” which is absolutely devastating, and “First Time,” which is also pretty crushing, but sounds groovy.
Hozier has released many extensions to the album, which were all compiled into the album “Unreal Unearth: Unending,” so if you want more of this album after finishing it, fret not, because there’s an entire album’s worth of bonus songs that are equally as good.
“Forever Is a Feeling” by Lucy Dacus (2025)
I only discovered this album recently, but I instantly fell in love with it. It does a great job of capturing the feeling of being in love and has such a calm and beautiful sound. While I think this album has less direct ties to spring, it just gives me so many spring vibes when I listen to it because of the messages of hope and love imbued in it.
Some of my favorite songs from this album are “Ankles,” “For Keeps” and “Best Guess.” This is another album that has a deluxe version with even more songs as well as different arrangements of songs from the original album, so I recommend checking it out as well.
“An Offering: Live at Speakeasy Studios” by Leslie Odom Jr. (2025)
Ever since seeing Odom live at IU Auditorium, I have been obsessed with this album.
It is a collection of covers performed live in front of a small audience, and I adore the way Odom arranges the songs and how they sound with his voice. They all have a smooth jazzy sound to them, and listening to this album never fails to calm me.
While other albums I’ve picked have had some pretty depressing songs on them, I think this album really highlights the soft sweetness of spring.
If you’ve heard the original songs on this album before, you’ll hear them like never before after listening to it all the way through. And if you’ve never even heard of most of them, this is a great way to discover new songs, sung in Odom's heavenly voice. I especially love his covers of “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)” from the musical of the same name, “Wait for It” from “Hamilton” and Ingrid Michaelson’s “Keep Breathing.”
