Eliana Glass

Eliana Glass masters the rarest of tricks for jazz singers on E, one of 2025’s most rapturous debuts: She is experimental but accessible, embodying the smokiness and mood of a late-night club, while always finding some novel twist in form or content. At once, she summons Billie Holiday but also Annette Peacock, Nina Simone but also Jenny Hval. On E’s dozen tracks, she offers a lullaby for doomed days in “Da,” an anthem for self-declaration in “Good Friends Call Me E,” and a pins-and-needles accounting of a life penned by artist Agnes Denes in “Human Dust.” E is often soft and quiet, Glass’ inquisitive piano playing backed by a rhythm section that is solid but limber. But it feels subtly revelatory, too, the hints of electronics and upended structures signaling the arrival of a significant vocalist and improviser.

Born in Australia to parents who countered kids’ music at home with indie rock and classic country, she moved to Seattle with her family when she was three years old. She balked at vocal exercises, but she loved to climb under the household piano and stare at its structure, its bulk and beauty, anyway. She wrote and sang on the records of multiple friends before she began piecing E together in sessions spread from Memphis to Michigan. With renditions of tracks by Peacock, Carla Bley, and Karin Krog and a dedication to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, E pulls from the pasts of exploratory singers and pianists, then bends them gently toward the future.