Fore Fader rises from the still desert to the pulse of the city as one of Los Angeles's most evocative new acts, presenting their debut album, Great Pretender as a cinematic reflection on illusion, mortality, and the audacity to face oneself. The album presents an invocation consisting of ten songs written, performed, produced, and mixed as a duo by Stephanie Carlin and Carey Clayton, not merely a collection of songs but a living ritual balancing between the sacred and the sensuous.
Recorded live between Joshua Tree National Park and Los Padres Forest, the album captures the elemental live experience. It was created in a moment in suspended animation between life and death, quite literally. "We wrote 'Great Pretender' when someone we loved was in the operating room," explains Carlin, "She had actually died and been revived to life. That song became a mirror, a reminder that we all kind of coast, pretending until something wakes us up."
"Holy and Pedulum" serves as the album's powerful centerpiece. Each piece flows prayerfully through multilayered vulnerability and grace, a spiritual unfolding of sorts, with lush and hypnotic sonic landscapes. From the haunting vocal dueling on "The Rains" to the cinematic sadness of "All I Ever", Fore Fader dissolves the line between the divine and the deeply human. The band’s sound evokes nods from Florence + The Machine, Massive Attack, and Weyes Blood, as they remain distinctive with emotional intimacy and sonic fullness.
Great Pretender draws strength from its duality; it is at once ancient and futuristic, organic and digital. Clayton’s production creates a world where shimmering synths meet tribal percussion, while Carlin’s voice calls for confession, healing, and transcendence. The listener is brought to an auditory experience that feels less like a product of music and instead like a ceremony, an invitation to feel, be free, and remember what is true.
Carlin characterizes the album as an improvisation with oneself. "But it’s also an homage to God — to the infinite intelligence that holds it all, and the ways we either question it, resent it, or swear by it.” Recent coverage has described Fore Fader as “hypnotic, sultry, and derived from R&B influences... reflective vibes that refresh like a revelation"
Great Pretender embraces darkness in a great and destructive way. It laments our emotional fragility in the same way that it glorifies divine connection. Each lyric feels like it was unloosed from experience, and every beat feels like a heartbeat beneath the stars. Critics have described Fore Fader's sound as "hypnotic, sultry, and begotten of rhythm and blues influence, evoking reflective vibes that awake like a revelation and refresh," and indeed the album functions as an inspiration to the duo's fearlessness and vulnerability, along with development without merit.
Live, Fore Fader changes performance into a collective remembrance. Their performances are called rituals of community, where the audience sways and chants together in a thrall of something larger than music. “Our vision,” says Carlin, “is to restore people to their wholeness to bring music that purifies and brings out what we already know but have forgotten." In Great Pretender, Fore Fader presents more than an album; they present a mirror. It is a haunting and transcendent body of work that looks into how truth and illusion, pain and ease, all live in the same sacred breath.