Alina Ly captures a decade of memory on debut album 'Shoebox'

For over a decade, Alina Ly has been quietly shaping her voice as a songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist - melding alternative indie soul with cinematic, deeply human storytelling. Now, she’s ready to share her most intimate work yet with her debut album, Shoebox.

Shoebox is a personal archive, a time capsule of emotion and experience. “For me, Shoebox serves as both a time capsule and a release,” Alina shares. “It’s the transformation of moments, emotions, and lessons from the past decade of a human experience into cathartic music.” Across the album’s cinematic soundscapes, listeners are invited into a world of whispered confessionals, expansive emotions, and the relief of release - all balanced with a buoyant sense of healing taking shape.

The heart of the record lies in “The Way of My Lover”, a song birthed during a pivotal hiatus when Alina stepped back from her long career to recalibrate her relationship with music. Captured in a single take with two microphones in the hallway outside her home studio, the track preserves the raw immediacy of a moment unfiltered by time or reflection. The song’s narrative - about loving someone whose self-destruction makes it impossible to stay - reflects the difficult but necessary process of letting go, both in personal relationships and as an artist learning to release her work.

Alina explains, “I’ve written so many songs up to this point in my life, and as a kind of catharsis I would tuck them away, like storing memories in shoeboxes. 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.” This metaphor of opening the shoebox encapsulates the central tension of the album: memory and reflection transformed into delicate, living art.

Each folded crane of Alina's artwork is a memory transformed into something beautiful. Shoebox also represents the first chapter in a three-part body of work, followed by Eden and Shoebox Vol. 2, chronicling Alina’s ongoing evolution as both artist and storyteller. To accompany the release, she presents a one-take live performance of the record, further emphasising the intimacy of these stories.

Yet Shoebox feels different, a record inviting listeners to inhabit Alina’s inner world, tracing moments of loss, reflection, and ultimately, release and renewal. “Through this album, I’m learning to do for my music what I’ve learned to do in my life: love, let go, and move forward,” she says.

Listen to Shoebox