When Hayley Williams first put together what would eventually become Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party, it wasn’t really an “album” in the usual sense (or at least not yet). It was a jumble of ideas, fragments, moods; all these little pieces that didn’t add up to a polished, radio-ready sequence. Instead, it asked you to do some of the work: to witness songs mid-transformation, to sit with them before they were nailed down into a final form. That framework of music existing as a sketch rather than a statement is rare. And that’s exactly the space Tim’s Solo is playing in: not quite an album, not quite a mixtape, but a 15-track ambient project that seems to whisper: “Hey, you decide how this works.”
Like Williams’ project, Solo doesn’t present itself as a neatly ordered arc. It’s more like a box of parts. You can play it straight through, hit shuffle, or carefully re-sequence the tracks until you feel clever about it. The point is the looseness. Tim is handing over control to you, trusting that you’ll make something of it. Which is kind of the whole ethos of ambient music anyway; it’s less about storytelling, more about mood, more about space.
The glue holding all of this together is Tim’s voice. If you squint your ears (so to speak), you might think of Moses Sumney, except Tim refuses to go high, refuses the cathartic falsetto. He just sits in the middle range, half-singing, half-reciting, almost like poetry read under the breath. It doesn’t demand the spotlight; instead, it melts into the production, turning voice into another instrument in the room. What you get are these zones of sound between meditative and hazy
And Tim’s real trick here is restraint. Most tracks are built on one or two sounds, looped until they hypnotize you. No walls of synths, no big crescendos; just skeletal frameworks you can slip inside. And somehow, that sparseness feels more intimate than complexity ever could.
Take the de facto opener, Solo. Six minutes of half-sung poetry against a soft, cloudlike synth loop. That’s it. But the repetition works like a mantra. It forces you to notice tiny shifts; the way Tim drags a word, or how the synth decays in the background. It’s a lesson in paying attention, in finding movement inside sameness.
Then there’s Waiting Rooms, which swaps the synth for a low trumpet loop. The sound is grounding, mournful, almost funereal, but still weirdly comforting. Other synths float in and out, like people passing through an actual waiting room, never staying long. You end up in a kind of liminal trance: time feels stretched, slowed, a little unreal.
The strangest experiment might be Sights and Seats. Over six minutes of Rhodes piano, Tim doubles himself, layering two opposing vocal tracks. One is solid and rooted; the other, slippery, almost contradicting the first. It feels like hearing him argue with himself, a self-conversation recorded and left unresolved. The Rhodes just keeps playing beneath it all, unbothered, like a mediator who refuses to intervene.
Cook Book is sharper, built on a looping violin that feels more abrasive than the piano or trumpet. It presses against Tim’s delivery, creating tension. The repetition here doesn’t soothe so much as insist. The violin refuses to fade into the background, demanding your attention.
Spread across 15 tracks, Solo ends up feeling weightless. Each piece is a sketch, a fleeting atmosphere. But together, they make something bigger, though not in the way a traditional album would. There’s no arc, no climax, no resolution. Instead, the project slowly teaches you how to listen to it: don’t look for payoffs, accept drift as meaningful, and sit with what feels unfinished.
And, look, this won’t work for everyone. If you want hooks, or crescendos, or catharsis, you’ll probably get bored and wander off. But that’s sort of the point. By refusing those payoffs, Tim forces your attention to become the missing ingredient. The listener isn’t passive here; you’re the collaborator.
In that sense, Solo recalls Brian Eno’s earliest ambient projects. Not music as dictation, but music as environment; something you shape with your own perception. Tim even takes it a step further: he doesn’t tell you the “right” order to hear it. Shuffle, resequence, skip around. Meaning changes depending on what you do. Which, in our era of playlists and algorithm-curated streams, feels oddly democratic.
If Tim’s Solo feels fragmented, that’s because it’s supposed to. Like Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party before it solidified, this project exists in that in-between stage, that liminal zone. It embraces incompleteness as a valid artistic choice. Instead of a definitive statement, Tim gives you an invitation: to listen, rearrange, and find your own path through the haze.
The result isn’t background music; it’s a canvas. Each track is less a conclusion than a door. And what happens when you step through? Well, that’s entirely up to you.
Follow Tim
About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
