Prime Cuts: "Anything, Everything" • "At The Well" • "Up With The Birds"
Overall Grade: 4/5
Olivia Stern's In the Meantime is a striking debut that resists easy resolution, offering instead a carefully held space for the tension of living between promise and fulfillment. Released March 20, 2026 in collaboration with Circuit Rider Music, the six-track project unfolds as a kind of spiritual diary-one that lingers in the unresolved rather than rushing toward clarity.
At its core, the EP is shaped by surrender-not as passive resignation, but as a deliberate reorientation of perspective. "Anything, Everything" captures this most explicitly, centering on the anxiety of needing answers and the quiet relief that comes with letting go. Stern explores the limits of human understanding with remarkable honesty, arriving not at certainty but at humility. The song feels like a turning point, where striving gives way to trust.
That trajectory deepens in "Never Had a Chance," co-written with Abby Williamson and Asa Stern. Built around the image of birds that do not worry about tomorrow, the track reframes surrender as an active choice. The lyric "to learn the fight may not be mine" is especially striking, not because it denies struggle, but because it relocates the believer's posture within it. Peace becomes not the absence of conflict, but the refusal to be defined by it.
"At The Well" stands out as one of the EP's most vivid moments, reimagining the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman with a modern, conversational immediacy. It breaks through the weight that characterizes much of the record, offering a sudden sense of relief-almost disbelief-that grace can arrive so directly. It is here that Stern's songwriting feels most narratively alive, collapsing distance between biblical text and present experience.
If much of In the Meantime dwells in heaviness, "Up With The Birds" offers its quiet resolution. The song does not resolve tension so much as reframe it, capturing the stillness of early morning when clarity feels possible simply because the noise has not yet returned. It functions as the first light of dawn within the EP's emotional landscape-gentle, unforced, and deeply grounding.
Sonically, the project mirrors its thematic restraint. The production is atmospheric and intimate, leaning into space rather than density. Nothing feels rushed or overstated. Instead, the arrangements create room for Stern's voice to carry both fragility and conviction, reinforcing the sense that these songs are less performed than confessed.
In the Meantime ultimately succeeds because it refuses to pretend that faith eliminates uncertainty. Instead, it suggests that faith transforms how one inhabits it. Olivia Stern emerges here as a thoughtful and compelling voice in modern worship-one who understands that the most honest songs are not always about arrival, but about learning how to wait.
