Alicia Moffet Is In Her Element

The Québec-born star’s new album, No, I’m Not Crying, is her boldest and most immersive work yet.

Cam Delisle

Photos by Aime-Elle

Published on May 27, 2025

By album three, most artists refine. Alicia Moffet redefines. No, I’m Not Crying isn’t interested in closure—it lingers in the aftermath, where the real story starts. It’s less a pop record, more of a haunted manifesto of everything left unsaid. “I hope you fucking choke,” she spits on the record’s lead single—a venomous hook that not only drives home the album’s thesis, but amplifies Moffet’s refusal to let silence swallow the truth.

Recorded entirely in Spatial Audio for Apple Music, the Québec-born polymath’s third album is her boldest and most immersive work to date. This breakthrough technology offers Moffet’s fans an intimate listen of No, I’m Not Crying, with multidimensional sound that pulls them closer to every detail. “It gives you this feeling that you’re in the song, rather than just listening to it,” Moffet details, offering a nod to her engineers’ ability to shape an atmospheric sound that feels almost tactile. “I have to give credit where credit is due, because this record wouldn’t be the same without them.”

Alicia Moffet doesn’t fabricate drama for the sake of narrative arc. If it’s not hers, it doesn’t make the cut. The result is less singer-songwriter diary, more emotional archaeology—each track a shard from moments she couldn’t ignore, no matter how neatly she’d tried to bury them. “I remember at one point during the process I had a blank page in front of me. I didn’t know what to do, I was like… my friends are great, my daughter’s great, my boyfriend’s great, everyone is great,” she says. That blankness didn’t stall her—it dared her. What followed was a return to the wreckage, a necessary unearthing. “It’s not something that I like to do, I like to tuck away past experiences and not think about them anymore,” she admits, sketching the portrait of an artist not chasing catharsis, but surrendering to it.

The time since Intertwine, her second studio album, doesn’t unfold chronologically—it unspools in defining moments, breakups and breakthroughs. Some of these include a quiet rebellion against people-pleasing, a severed tie with her former manager and father of her child, a left-turn alliance with Montreal’s Cult Nation, and a detour into mainstream visibility via French-Canadian reality show, Occupation Double. These aren’t just bullet points on a bio, they’re pressure points, each one pressing Moffet closer to the version of herself that doesn’t flinch or ask for permission. “I really didn’t want to rush this album, it wasn’t fueled by a deadline,” she says. “In the last three years there’s been so much going on, and [I feel] like the foundation is stronger than ever now.”

Listening to Moffet speak about the album, you can feel it: the clarity, the peace, the hard-won joy. There’s something quietly radical about watching someone who’s been circling themselves for years finally land. No, I’m Not Crying reads like an open-hearted autobiography from an artist who once wore detachment like armour (fittingly, the track “Colder” is one of the album’s standouts). Now, she’s loosening the grip—learning the strange, unsteady rhythms of vulnerability, and starting to move through them like they’re hers to claim. “I feel like I’m a very warm person, so in turn, the album is imagining this facade of trying not to cry or communicate my emotions,” she says—ironically, right before acknowledging that the songs are her emotions, laid bare.

Now, in 2025, Moffet is no longer circling the return, she’s in it. A winter headlining tour is on the horizon, alongside a supporting run with Alessia Cara, and whispers of a deluxe edition of No, I’m Not Crying already in motion. “I love being in the studio, and I love touring… I miss it so much,” she says, her voice stretching somewhere between longing and anticipation. There’s no grand thesis here, no final act of healing tied up in a bow. What this era of Moffet offers instead is something messier and braver: an artist giving language to the things she once tried to swallow. Moffet isn’t reaching for closure—she’s sitting in the wreckage, naming every piece, and daring it to echo back.