Alina Ly Opens the Lid on a Decade of Becoming with Debut Album Shoebox

After more than ten years of writing, touring, and carving quiet spaces for reflection, Alina Ly is finally ready to open the box. Her debut album Shoebox is a decade of memory and release, held together by intimate confessionals and the slow, cinematic bloom of emotional transformation.

Shoebox radically reconstructs everything Alina has lived through. Across the record’s hushed production and soul-stricken melodies, she builds a world of soft revelation - a place where grief and clarity exist as one. “For me, Shoebox serves as both a time capsule and a release,” she shares. “It's the transformation of moments, emotions, and lessons from the past decade of a human experience into cathartic music.”

For an artist who has been orbiting stages across the UK and US for years, the album marks a milestone that didn’t come easily. After releasing a string of singles and performing relentlessly, Alina stepped away from the noise to recalibrate. What emerged from that pause was “The Way of My Lover,” written and recorded in a single unfiltered take: two microphones placed in the hallway outside her home studio, catching a moment before she could polish or overthink it.

The track became the emotional anchor of the entire album. “It’s about the pain of loving someone whose self-destruction made it impossible to stay,” she explains. “It’s the hard lesson that only through letting go of someone you once believed was everything can you begin to understand yourself again.” If Shoebox is a decade-long archive, “The Way of My Lover” is the page circled in red ink.

Throughout the record, Alina treats memory like raw material: something to be held, studied, transformed, and finally released. She likens her songwriting to stacking shoeboxes in a dimly lit closet - a ritual of storing her past away until the weight of it became impossible to ignore. “Over time, it felt like I was sitting in a closet surrounded by shelves filled with them, until I realized I needed to open the door before I was suffocated.”

In keeping with the album’s ethos of unvarnished presence, Alina is releasing a one-take live performance of the full record, filmed at Jade Studios - her way of honouring the intimacy from which these songs were born.

Shoebox arrives as a revelation - a culmination of every folded memory, every unspoken truth, every moment she tucked away until she was ready to lift the lid. And in doing so, she gives listeners permission to sift through their own.

Listen to Shoebox:

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