On her new album, Payton combines honesty and devotion with a care for the finished product.

It could be said that every song is a love song – even songs of loss, even songs of heartbreak, even songs of rage. Even when Molly Payton sings “I am going to fuck up cupid” on her second album ‘Eternity’, that’s a love song.

Because what is love if not care? And God knows there can be no art, certainly no music in this cut-throat state of the industry currently, without genuine care and the kind of effort that only comes from passion. After releasing ‘YOYOTTA’ as an independent artist and after having already clocked years of tireless trying in the music world, witnessing just about every corner and every crime in the industry from bad business to big arenas, Payton wasn’t sure she’d ever make a sophomore, but here we are. There is only one reason: love.

But in this cursed modern industry, the feeling is murky. Artists are expected to hang on to love of the game to survive painstaking conditions, and all around them dangerous lies spiral. One of the worst is the idea that good art comes in an instant. Nonchalance demands a final draft with ease as if creatives should now be shy about the graft they put in. Though no one would ever define any of Payton’s prior work as lazy, the writer herself will admit that up until this point, she believed in the one-and-done approach with whatever was first written on the page making the final cut.

‘Eternity’, however, is a record born from redrafting and rediscovering. Several of the songs here are years old, found as abandoned scraps or relics of past relationships that got lost in the shroud of old feelings. Now, with hindsight on those emotions, and motivated by an active mission to learn from her idols like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and strive towards finding the exact right words, Payton’s new album is more like a marble statue, chiselled slowly and carefully to perfection.

But perfection and the mission for timelessness doesn’t mean cliché.

Even in these final draft forms, Payton knows that life needs to be left in. Having spent her days in between her last album and listen one listening to the classics on the speakers at her café day job, it feels as though that was the secret discovered. ‘Eternity’ leaves in plenty of giggle-inducing Payton-isms, just as Cohen never sacrificed dry humour and Michell never let go of specificity. They feel like signs of truth, and of true life.

Timelessness doesn’t demand neatness or broad universality. Instead, the secret is balance, and ‘Eternity’ find a perfect position between ease and effort, melodrama and reality, humour and humility, spontaneity and grandeur.

On the record’s title track, a tune that about as adoring as love songs come, a line like “ink your name on my ass” only adds to that fact. Real romance should make you laugh.

‘Wiser’ collapses into silliness with a chorus of friends giving up on finding the answers to sing “ba da ba ba” instead, while on ‘Similar Pain’, Payton stays the course, spitting the exact thing she wants to say: “You won’t find a fix in the girl, go try and kiss the whole world.” ‘Twirl’ is girlish and giddy, while ‘Pick Me Up’ is spiky in its confusion, like the worries of a relationship beginning to collapse, all stuck together with glue. It’s a perfected and complete draft, as all these songs are, but Payton knows the final form here should be barely held together by hanging threads, care and expert control shown in the curated messiness.

Elsewhere, other songs are polished golden. ‘Subaru’ is arena-sized, while ‘Hercules’, sitting at the complete opposite side of the spectrum, displays the type of songwriting that would make Adrianne Lenker jealous.

Through the tracklist, Payton wanders through feelings, states and genres, analysing emotions from different vantage points. But then comes a moment of truly special certainty. ‘Mary’ is as soft as they come, a song for her mother, the purest love on the album, all gratitude singing “your hope will consume me”. It sits like a subtly placed explainer – the origin story of Payton’s tender heart.

It could be said that every song is a love song, every song being the product of a person pouring themselves into something, nurturing that something, caring about it. ‘Eternity’, a collection of songs of love, heartbreak, healing, is not only a product of care but also an act of devotion. It is a testament to timelessness in the way an emotion like yearning will always be universal, and how all the best art leaves a little space for off-the-cuff reality; a little laugh, some meanness, a tear in the eyes of a smile.