As a teenager, Lauren Edman was too shy to practice her singing exercises at home, but she grew up to be a woman with the moxie to perform on Apollo Amateur Night where contestants are routinely booed offstage. Lauren’s seductively spare solo debut It’s Always the Quiet One, released in 2012, was a prismatic and intimate self-portrait. It’s a starkly vulnerable album that peeks under the veneer of shyness and examines the inner struggles of someone courageously and coyly grappling with the societal and personal manifestations of being soft-spoken. Lauren is best known for her singing and songwriting on the track “Afterthoughts” from Sleepthief’s 2006 electronic album The Dawnseeker. At the time, she was a relatively unknown talent with a passion for trip-hop featuring ethereal but strong female vocalists. The Connecticut native moved to New York City around that time with the plan of making an album of her own music, but in the years that followed she struggled to find a balance between producing the music that played in her head and paying the rent. While working a night job that prevented much socializing outside of work and the internet, she wrote many of the songs on It’s Always the Quiet One at around 3:00AM in the closet-sized Queens bedroom she lived in at the time. In 2009, she joined shoegaze band For Every Story Untold (now known as Slow Motion Picture), recording and performing with the group until 2014 and providing vocals for 2014 album In Memory Of. Now, Northern Flicker is Lauren’s new solo project. Lauren started Northern Flicker as a space to make the sort of music she now craves, to work through lingering doubts and regrets while moving forward and creating something beautiful. In contrast to her earlier solo work’s freewheeling genre-hopping, Northern Flicker is deliberately more focused, as can be heard in mesmerizing debut single “Blanket.” The multi-instrumentalist has added some new instruments to her repertoire to complement the new sound, but her signature ethereal, sweet voice is still front and center. Northern Flicker’s debut EP will be released in 2015.