CD Review: Lucy Woodward, I Need to Roam

Lucy Woodward’s new album “I Need to Roam” is a record that refuses to sit still, and it’s better for it. Where her 2024 release with The Rocketeers leaned more into a rich theatrical jazz soundscape (one of my favourites of that year) this new set moves in a different direction entirely. It’s more pop, more commercial on the surface, and more direct in its production. But don’t mistake this for simplicity. This isn’t music that’s been dumbed down. If anything, it’s been dumbed up.

That’s not a contradiction I make lightly. Across nine tracks, Woodward and her longtime band The Rocketeers — guitarist Jelle Roozenburg, drummer Niek de Bruijn, and bassist Udo Pannekeet — build arrangements that keep folding new ideas into more pop and rock focused structures without ever losing the immediacy that makes that type of record work in the first place. This is a band nine years into a working relationship, one that has performed at major clubs and festivals throughout Europe and beyond and has never felt the constraints of genre. That history is audible in the playing — tight and entirely locked in.

Woodward’s own career has seemed to avoid a single narrative. She broke through in 2003 with her debut album for Atlantic Records, While You Can, and the Top 40 single “Dumb Girls,” and spent the following two decades working her way through soul, blues, and jazz contexts — records with Charlie Hunter, guest spots with Snarky Puppy, a stint fronting Pink Martini, big band dates with major European radio orchestras. I Need to Roam is neither a pop comeback nor a jazz departure. It’s simply the next stop for an artist who has spent twenty years moving freely between all of these worlds and finally made a record that draws on every one of them at once.

The album opens with “Roam,” a track built on a fusion of Afrobeat and flamenco pulse that announces its intentions immediately — this is going to be a record with a lot of ground to cover, and it wastes no time getting moving. “Yes” follows with a triple-pulse Afro-inflected guitar figure from Roozenburg, and it’s here that Woodward’s vocal phrasing really catches the ear; the way she weaves around the rhythm rather than sitting squarely on top of it is one of the album’s small pleasures, easy to miss on a first pass and hard to stop noticing after that.

“Dust” shifts gears into rock territory, and on first listen it sounds like the most straightforward thing here. It isn’t. There are layers underneath that reveal themselves on repeat plays — a production choice that runs through much of the record. “Always” pulls toward the blues and is one of the genuine highlights, Woodward’s voice sitting in a lower, grittier register than the opening tracks prepared me for. Then “In My Room” turns again, this time toward EDM-inflected dance pop, and the production on this one is sharp — upfront, punchy, nothing buried in the mix.

“Wonderland” might be the album’s centrepiece. It leans Americana in feel, features Grammy-nominated vocalist Varijashree Venugopal, and carries real weight behind the melody — Woodward has described it as a meditation on the sites of adolescence where transformation strikes, good and bad at once, and that emotional range comes through in an arrangement full of production surprises. It’s a highlight, and deservedly so. “Keeparound Lover” goes back to rock but with a heavy funk undertow hiding beneath the surface, and the vocal performance here is one of the album’s strongest — a genuinely killer track. “Troubadora,” a folk-leaning ballad, functions as the record’s one quiet rest in the sequencing, well-placed after seven tracks that rarely pause for breath. The closer, “Hush,” lands with an unmistakable 80s alt-pop feel, and it’s a confident way to end things.

What holds nine tracks moving through flamenco, rock, Delta blues, EDM, Americana, funk, folk, and alt-pop together is Woodward’s voice and The Rocketeers’ playing. The production, credited in part to guitarist Roozenburg and longtime Woodward collaborator Todd Wright, keeps everything sounding direct and immediate rather than cluttered, which matters given how much ground the arrangements cover. Guest appearances from Chris Pierce and the Haarlem children’s choir add texture without ever feeling like guest-spot padding.

There’s a personal dimension underneath all of this too. Woodward has spoken about recent volunteer work in Rwanda, teaching singing and songwriting to Afghan girls who’d escaped Taliban rule, and about how that experience shaped her thinking about creative freedom while she was writing this material. You don’t need to know that background to enjoy the record, but it’s there in the album’s underlying preoccupation with movement and openness — “the trip inward,” as Woodward puts it, “from the kid I was, to the person I am now.”

I’ll be upfront: this may not be every jazz listeners cup of tea. Listeners who came to Woodward via her 2024 Rocketeers record, and are expecting a straight continuation should note that this is a considerably different beast. But writing it off on those grounds would be a huge mistake. There’s a lot going on here, and almost all of it requires close listening. Woodward has made a career out of refusing categories, and I Need to Roam is another confident turn in that direction — one of the more purely enjoyable listens I’ve come across this year. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Look out for our in-depth interview with Lucy Woodward, conducted by Marieke Meischke, coming soon to Jazz in Europe.

Line-Up:
Lucy Woodward, Vocals | Jelle Roozenburg, Guitar | Niek de Bruijn, Drums | Udo Pannekeet, bass

Release Date: 7 August 2026
Format: CD | LP | Streaming
Label: GroundUP Music

Produced by Todd Wright & Lucy Woodward
Mix by Nic Hard
Master by Dave McNair
Band recording engineer – Simon Akkermans at Epic Rainbow Studio, Rotterdam, Netherlands
Vocal engineer – Todd Wright, Hamilton, Virginia

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