Tessa Rose Jackson

THE LIGHTHOUSE - NEW ALBUM OUT JANUARY 23 2026

Visionary Dutch-British singer songwriter and composer Tessa Rose Jackson returns in January 2026 with her third studio album, The Lighthouse; a haunting yet life-affirming reflection on ancestry and belonging.
Written during a secluded period in rural France The Lighthouse sees Jackson stepping out from behind her acclaimed decade-long moniker Someone to embrace her own name once more. Rich with ghostly folklore, spectral folk, and cinematic alt-pop textures, the record explores themes of mortality, memory, and gratitude, ultimately shining a light on life’s most fragile and beautiful details.
“The Lighthouse felt like a beacon,” Jackson reflects. “It’s an album that talks about death, but not in a purely dark sense. For me, it’s also about the celebration of life - embracing fears, identity, and the stories we inherit.”
The album opens with the title track “The Lighthouse,” the first song Tessa wrote which opened the creative flood gates for the whole record. “The lyrics are just what I’d gone through,” she says. “The idea of a sailor out at sea and everything is misty, veiled and unclear. And then suddenly there's this lighthouse in the distance. ‘The Lighthouse’ felt like that - okay, I have something, I can go there.”

Other highlights include “The Man Who Wasn’t There” a dark folk piece in the vein of Sharon Van Etten, pastoral but unearthly and its sister-piece “Grace Notes,” a muted piano and acoustic lament in which Jackson confronts the life paths she hasn’t yet taken. “I’m not the woman I thought I’d have to be by now,” she sings, considering aimlessness, fleeting youth and the pressures of potential motherhood. Recent single, “The Bricks That Make the Building”, with its brushes of harp and pastoral vocal melody looks back to our ancestry and shared heritage; “It’s a musing on the blood that runs through us all,” Jackson explains. “A sense of gratitude towards the lives that shaped ours.” Whilst “Dawn” written as a song of support for her niece, uses an infectious Mellotron flute melody woven around an intricate, groovy folk guitar.

Several songs speak directly to one of Tessa’s parents, now deceased. The stately, Gallic-flecked “Wild Geese” is a poignant tribute; Jackson often thinks of her mother as part of a flock of geese flying over Lake Superior in her home state of Minnesota, “she always used to talk about it with so much love.” And the misty, confiding “Gently Now” tackles the issue of growing older and more comfortable with your grief. “Grief is that you loved someone,” Tessa concludes. “That, in a sense, can only be beautiful.”

Others defiantly square up to the reaper. With its Fiona Apple junk beats and Sufjan Stevens climax, “When Your Time Comes” is Jackson’s “Tim Burton song,” turning the lens on the listener to consider their interpretation of their final moments. And “Fear Bangs the Drum” celebrates our deepest fears to the sound of spectral atmospherics and a playful brass hook.

BIO:
For 33-year-old Jackson, it’s been a colourful, if turbulent, journey to The Lighthouse. Raised in Amsterdam to two lesbian mothers, she sadly lost one of her parents at a young age. “I learned to think about death and loss as something inescapable and vast very early on,” she says. “I always used to say: if you’re not a little bit scared of dying… do you really appreciate what it means to be alive?”

Her 2013 album (Songs From) The Sandbox was a success for her at the age of 19, but also an instant albatross. “I realised very quickly that I wanted to go much deeper into music, into much more interesting waters.” Rejecting performative pop, for the next decade she retreated behind a kind of anti-pseudonym, recording simply as Someone - a project which pushed the boundaries of art and music with experimental visuals, augmented reality, and immersive live shows. From 2017, Someone indulged influences from Air to Charlotte Gainsbourg, Carole King, Feist and Tame Impala to make beautiful dream pop music. Releases included 2019’s Orbit EP, 2020’s EP Orbit II, and the albums; 2021’s Shapeshifter and 2023’s Owls.

Ultimately, Someone dissolved into the ether. “It allowed me to develop in my own artistry, and allowing that to shape without too much outside pressure, “ says Tessa. “I feel like it did its job, and now I can go back to my own name.” And revealed as Tessa Rose Jackson again, she began peeling back the layers even further for a new era. With The Lighthouse Tessa distills the spirit of innovation she explored as Someone, into something rawer and deeply personal. A bright beam of reassurance from the darkness, The Lighthouse is both timely and timeless, intimate and universal, sumptuous and spare. It marks a turning point not just in Jackson’s career, but in her reckoning with memory, grief, and identity - an album that doesn’t just reflect her journey, but transforms it into something beautiful.

Following the album, there will be a documentary made during the recording sessions of The Lighthouse. Shot by Bibian Bingen, it offers an intimate look at Jackson’s creative process. The premiere is scheduled to be later in 2026.

The Lighthouse is out January 23 2026, pre save here: https://hypeddit.com/h0rdd5