Ellen Beth Abdi's Debut Kicks Off With A Dreamy Gut-punch Of A Track
Ellen Beth Abdi’s debut album blends soulful sounds and lockdown reflections, led by the hypnotic opening track Who This World Is Made For.
NEW RELEASESNEWS
5/26/20251 min read
Manchester’s Ellen Beth Abdi makes a confident entrance with her debut, self-titled album Who This World Is Made For, out on Sweet Twenty-Three Records.
The track is a moody, soulful blend of textures. It’s rooted in the quiet chaos of lockdown, a time of repetition, isolation, and reevaluating the world and our place in it. Abdi wrote the chorus after waking up with the melody looping in her head, saying the words “just kept spinning and spinning around.”
The simplicity of the keyboard part, with its subtle, looping build, mirrors the lyrics’ themes: feeling stuck, questioning what really matters, and reckoning with privilege and helplessness. There’s a raw honesty to it that makes the track feel personal, but also weirdly familiar. While the production feels easy-going, it’s introspective without being heavy, smooth without losing its edge.
The full album features ten tracks, with six brand new ones alongside previous releases like Tenterhooks and Sad Chord, plus a creative all-vocal cover of Rae & Christian’s Spellbound. Each track adds something different but keeps that sense of emotional depth and genre-blending experimentation.
Abdi has spent years playing with some of Manchester’s biggest names — from touring with A Certain Ratio to sharing stages with New Order, the Stone Roses, and international acts like Lady Blackbird and Angelique Kidjo. But with Who This World Is Made For, she sounds fully like herself: reflective, bold, powerful.
Listen to Who This World Is Made For:
