English neoclassical composer Poppy Ackroyd is releasing her new album Pause, written during the pandemic and shortly after the birth of her first child, on Friday. While 2018’s Resolve expanded the scope of Ackroyd’s electroacoustic piano and violin pieces, bringing in outside collaborators and instruments for the first time, Pause is a more intimate collection of 10 solo piano works.

“For previous albums almost as much of the creative process was spent editing and manipulating recordings as it was composing at the piano, however after having my son, I struggled to spend time sat in front of a computer,” Ackroyd explains. “The only thing I wanted to do while he was still small, if I wasn’t with him, was to play the piano. In fact, much of the album was written with him asleep on me in a sling as I used any quiet moment to compose.”

“It therefore made sense that this album should be a solo piano album,” Ackroyd continues. “I used extended technique — playing with sounds from inside the instrument — like I do in my multi-tracked recordings, however it was important to me that every track on the album could be entirely performed with just two hands on the piano.” Listen to new song “Murmurations,” inspired by the collective movement of starlings, below.

And here are the other early tracks “Stillness,” “Release,” and “Seedling”:

Pause is out 11/12 via One Little Independent.