Album review : NINA ANTONIA AND THE LUNAR MOTHS – Dropping Like Butterflies

Creation Youth [Release date 26.06.26]

Released via Alan McGee’s Creation Youth imprint, this is the first album from Antonia, an acclaimed English author, and it arrives with strong countercultural credentials and a clear commitment to literary ambition.

The problem is that ambition alone is not enough.

Across its running time, Dropping Like Butterflies immerses itself in a hazy world of faded glamour, underground icons and poetic reminiscence.

Antonia’s texts draw on decades of cultural mythology and there are moments when her eye for detail is genuinely evocative, capturing the melancholy allure of lives lived on the margins.

The spoken-word format places enormous pressure on the writing, and while Antonia’s delivery is measured and assured, the material frequently lacks the dramatic tension needed to sustain attention as seen in “Lunar Moths”, “Chatterton, Euston” and “Thames’ Doom”. The poems unfold at much the same emotional register from track to track, creating a sense of stasis that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. What initially feels dreamlike gradually begins to feel inert.

Musically, The Lunar Moths provide a backdrop of chiming guitars and nocturnal textures overseen by Mike Scott, but the arrangements rarely challenge or complicate the mood. Instead, they reinforce it, resulting in a record that settles into a narrow groove and seldom escapes. Individual tracks blur into one another, with few moments of surprise or genuine momentum.

Antonia’s fascination with bohemian culture and artistic outsiders is laudable, however the record itself is weighed down by a monotony that dulls the impact of its strongest passages and rarely generates enough emotional urgency to lift itself beyond admiration and into genuine engagement. **1/2

Reviewed by Jennifer Small

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