ALBUM REVIEW: Jade Mia Broadhead – Delicate Flower, Prickly Thorns

Released: 03.10.25

Falling somewhere between social activism and rose-tinted nostalgia, Jade Mia Broadhead’s Delicate Flower, Prickly Thorn is something of an outlier in today’s musical climate but the grammatical juxtaposition in the album title is a good early indicator of an album that bounces effortlessly between serious topical folk and punchy guitar pop for fans of Bob Dylan, James and The The. While Delicate Flower, Prickly Thorns doesn’t deviate far from a tried and tested formula of melancholic lyrical interplay and light guitar hooks there is enough variation in the nuanced approach to different musical incursions (Baby Of Mine is genuinely lovely) that make this thirteen song collection a must for North East music aficionados, but also anyone who feels like an outsider or just unlucky in love and life.

So, opener Lost Souls sets out a positive pathway as an option, while Bygones is a big standout track and Tomorrow You’ll Catch A Falling Star is the nearest thing here to a big anthemic ballad, complete with a flute solo, neither convincingly signposts a happy ending. Elsewhere, The World’s Greatest Actress, with some cheeky handclaps, makes musical light of the underlying painful self-awareness barely concealed in the lyrics, while River pulls at the heartstrings like Martha’s Orange Juice, and Kelsey Jade borrows the haunting piano motif from Craig Finn’s God In Chicago to good effect.

However, The Woman That Saved Me (along with Cocked And Loaded) are the oddly upbeat country-tinged odes to oneself that carry this album (and, one suspects, our protagonist) along the ultimate road to self-fulfilment. Just the kind of occasional positive pick-me-ups Delicate Flower, Prickly Thorns needs to keep it from descending into too much self-deprecation, as it desperately tries to punch a light hole into the end of the long dark tunnel.