Rating: 8/10

There is a particular kind of radical act that does not look like protest at first glance. It looks like a woman standing centre stage, midlife, unshrinking, refusing to dilute her voice for comfort or palatability. That is what Dryadic’s Permission To Speak feels like from its opening bars.

Since 2017, Dryadic have carved out a space within contemporary folk that is unapologetically feminist, queer-rooted and defiantly live-focused. But this album marks something different. Not a reinvention. A sharpening.

Zora McDonald frames the record as a coming of age, though not the glossy youth-coded version culture usually celebrates. Instead, it is about visibility. About what happens when women are expected to quieten. So she does the opposite.

The opener, Can’t Keep Up, does not ease you in. Written during a period of homelessness and depression, the song carries the emotional architecture of crisis. The tension in the arrangement mirrors exhaustion. The repeated longing for “home” is literal and existential. It is a bold choice to begin here. It signals that this album will not be decorative.

Where Dryadic excel is in orchestration. Piano now sits at the heart of their sound. Bowed double bass rumbles underneath with cinematic depth. Fiddle lines are not embellishments but structural hooks. The string arrangements feel intentional rather than ornamental. There is space. Then there are sudden, sweeping build-ups that feel earned.

Redevelop Our Souls is perhaps the most overtly political moment. A protest song rooted in housing activism and class consciousness, it blends folk-rock propulsion with communal energy. It is not subtle in its politics, and it is not trying to be. It understands that clarity is sometimes more powerful than cleverness.

Then there is Ghosts, one of the album’s emotional anchors. Piano-led, intimate, brutally honest about internalised shame and inherited patterns, it resists melodrama. The drama arrives through arrangement, not volume. When the drums enter and the bass drops into that low rumble, it feels less like a crescendo and more like emotional excavation.

Dryadic’s queerness is not aesthetic. It is lived and explicit. Smiling In The Dark is a queer love song sung woman to woman without apology. It is joyful without irony. Romantic without coyness. In a cultural landscape still starved of midlife queer love songs, that alone matters.

Mansplain walks a delicate line between fury and wit. The lyrics are sharp, but the arrangement remains melodic and grounded. It is feminist rage delivered through folk harmonies rather than distortion pedals. That contrast works. It exposes the absurdity of the behaviour being critiqued rather than merely shouting over it.

Not My Government brings the record back to overt protest. Written in response to political betrayal and policy violence, it feels urgent rather than reactive. The gang vocals push it toward collective anthem territory. You can imagine it shouted in the streets.

And yet the album is not all fire. Cruel is the heartbreak ballad. Play Me A Song is romantic and literary, almost pastoral. Gongoozling For Two carries nostalgia and dreamlike tenderness. Even the instrumental closer, Susie’s Challenge, demonstrates Dryadic’s willingness to play with form and tradition, shifting time signatures with confidence rather than gimmickry.

What makes Permission To Speak compelling is not simply its politics or queerness or craftsmanship. It is the integration of all three. The album does not posture. It feels lived in.

There is a maturity here that does not equate to softening. Instead, it feels like clarity. McDonald’s voice carries vulnerability and authority in equal measure. The band’s arrangements support that balance rather than overpower it.

In a music industry that frequently sidelines women once they step outside youth marketing brackets, Permission To Speak feels quietly radical. It insists on visibility. It insists on complexity. It insists on community.

And crucially, it sounds like Dryadic. Not chasing trends. Not smoothing edges. Not asking for permission.

They have already granted it to themselves.