Liam wants the songs stuck in his head to get stuck in yours. In Only Forward, those songs follow the playbook of 2020’s Visions of a Perfect Life: infectious melodies, lush orchestration, and clever, personal lyrics. These common threads allow the album to visit a wide variety of styles, each song a unique character, each still distinctly Liam.
Only Forward deals largely with transitions, using themes like seasonal change as proxies for personal growth. There is only forward — because the past is behind us, and the future doesn’t exist.
For a while, Liam was concerned about letting his world of “classical music” mix with his world of “everything else”. But, like many things, genre is a spectrum. Only Forward serves as a reminder for him and the rest of us that all music has always been everything else.