Patience

After her band Veronica Falls split up in the early 2010s, vocalist/guitarist Roxanne Clifford began writing and recording synth pop under the name Patience. After a handful of singles introduced her sound — which featured different instrumentation but also the same sense of dramatic melancholy Clifford brought to previous projects — the first Patience album, Dizzy Spells, was released in 2019.
When Veronica Falls folded after a six-year span that spawned numerous singles, tours, and two albums, Clifford moved from the U.K. to Los Angeles. Once there she began writing and demo-ing guitar-based songs like those of her former band and synth pop-influenced tracks that utilized keyboards and programming. Feeling that the latter said more about her state of mind, and because the immediate nature of recording them appealed to her, she started Patience as an outlet and released a single (“The Church”/“My Own Invention”) on Night School Records in early 2016. It was recorded partly at home and finished in Glasgow with Lewis Cook of Glasgow duo Happy Meals. Another single recorded in similar fashion, “The Pressure”/“Wait for You,” was released later in the year. One last single cut with Cook, “White of an Eye”/“Blue Sparks” was issued in 2017. Each single showed off her synth pop bona fides, using genres as disparate as Chicago House, Strawberry Switchblade-style indie pop and Yaz. The first Patience album, Dizzy Spells, featured the three previously released singles along with songs recorded with the engineering help of Virginia Wing’s Misha Herring, a house-inspired track co-produced by sometime-Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards, and a vocal duet with Veronica Falls bandmate Marion Herbain. Clifford started her own Winona Records label to release the album in May of 2019, while Night School did the honors in the U.K. ~ Tim Sendra