Alina Ly’s highly-anticipated debut album Shoebox arrives November 14 2025 (LISTEN HERE) – a culmination of years of emotional evolution, held in a series of intimate and cinematic soundscapes.
Shoebox invites listeners into her world – one filled with whispered confessionals, expansive emotions, and the relief of release. Yet the album is buoyant, allowing the feeling of healing taking its shape. For Alina, Shoebox is a personal archive. “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.”
Alina Ly is no stranger to the music scene. With over a decade of songwriting, regular live performances across the UK and US, and an array of releases under her belt, Alina felt it was time to take a hiatus – to recalibrate her own relationship with the craft. It was very soon after that she wrote “The Way of My Lover”, the song she now credits as the heart of her debut album. Captured in a single take with two microphones placed in the hallway outside Alina’s home studio, the track preserves the raw presence of a moment before it had time to be softened or analysed. Thematically, the song describes the loss and learned acceptance of a past relationship. Personally, the song also represents Alina unlocking a new level of vulnerable songwriting.
On the track, she shares, “During my hiatus, “The Way of My Lover” was one of the first songs that came out of me and it ended up holding so much of the album’s emotional truth. It’s about the pain of loving someone whose self-destruction made it impossible to stay. It’s the hard lesson that only through letting go of someone you once believed was everything can you begin to understand yourself again.
The songs on Shoebox may have taught Alina the power of love and letting go in her personal relationships, but through the act of creating and releasing this album – she’s learning to do the same with her music too. She shares, “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.”
Visually, the album’s artwork – a shoebox overflowing with paper cranes – encapsulates Alina’s creative vision: each folded crane a memory transformed into something delicate and beautiful. Shoebox also marks the first chapter of a three-part body of work, followed by Eden and Shoebox Vol. 2, tracing her evolution as an artist and storyteller. Accompanying the album is a one-take live performance of the record from front to back – Alina’s own way of paying homage to the intimacy of these stories.
Artist bio: Alina Ly is an Alternative Indie Soul artist whose music transforms memory, grief, and love into cinematic, soul-stirring soundscapes. A singer, songwriter, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, Alina’s genre-blurring sound merges haunting vocals, introspective lyricism, and atmospheric production; an evocative balance of vulnerability and vision.
Her highly anticipated debut album, Shoebox preserves moments of loss, reflection, and healing while offering listeners a sense of release and renewal. The album’s title track and debut single, “Shoebox,” introduced this world with striking emotional resonance.
From her career beginnings in Seattle and now based in Los Angeles, Alina first emerged with the live studio project Take One Live (2017) and acclaimed singles like “Undercurrent,” “Higher,” and “Keep Me Warm.” Her music has earned recognition from Wonderland, CLASH, FAME, alongside a co-written sync placement in Emily in Paris (2022). With over 4 million streams and sold-out performances across Europe and the U.S., Alina continues to carve her own lane in alternative soul, creating art that feels cinematic yet deeply human. With Shoebox, Alina doesn’t just tell her story — she invites you to feel your own.
Listen to Shoebox:
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