Whisper Doll Find Their Sparkle on Lucky Clover, a Dream-Pop Sophomore Album Built in New York

On Lucky Clover, the New York City project led by Fiona Tagami steps fully into the light, sharing their sophomore album out now via Take Care Records. Across 10 ethereal tracks, Tagami’s dulcet vocals hold equal parts vulnerability and self-assured strength, carried by gauzy guitars and infectious rhythms that shimmer without losing their bite.

What makes Lucky Clover feel like a turning point isn’t just the sound—it’s the sense of arrival. Whisper Doll began as a solo project back in high school, when Tagami was still in Atlanta, writing songs alone in her bedroom and falling hard for bands like The Sundays, Mazzy Star, and The Cranberries. That early DNA is still here: dream-pop romance, a little ache, a little sweetness, the feeling of looking out a window and watching your life move past you in slow motion. But between then and now, everything expanded.

During the making of the debut album Perfume Garden (2024), Tagami moved to New York and quickly found herself wrapped up in the city’s indie scene—playing in other projects, meeting collaborators, learning what it means to build something in a place that never stops moving. In that swirl, she found her future Whisper Doll bandmates: drummer Shawn Majeed, guitarist Maya Lagman, and bassist Julia Chrzanowski. Lucky Clover is the first Whisper Doll record made as a full band, and the first created entirely in NYC—capturing a newfound clarity for Tagami and a newly collaborative process that gives the songs more muscle, more momentum, and more room to breathe.

That collaborative spark is at the heart of the album’s emotional palette—especially on the track that inspired its title and spirit. Tagami traces the beginning of the song back to a simple moment of creative exchange. “This song began when Maya sent me the little sparkly riff that comes in with the drums in the beginning,” she says. “I wanted this song to feel hopeful and sparkly and sweet.”

It’s a small detail, but it reveals the larger shift: Lucky Clover is built from shared language now—bandmates passing ideas back and forth, shaping the atmosphere together. Tagami leaned into innocence on the melody, writing it to echo the purity of a children’s choir—sing-songy, bright, unguarded. And then real life walked in and made the metaphor literal.

“I had just fallen in love with a sweet cat that lived at the bodega down the street from me,” she says. “He was the perfect cat of my dreams. Grey and white and super fluffy. He would come to greet me every time I went there and would sit by the window and stare at me as I walked away.”

For her birthday, the bodega let her adopt him. The timing mattered: it happened when “lots of things fell into place,” when the city stopped feeling like a test and started feeling like a home. She named the cat Lucky—and suddenly the album’s emotional thesis snapped into focus. Sometimes luck isn’t random. Sometimes it’s the moment you realize you’re finally living inside the life you wanted.

Ahead of the full release, Lucky Clover was previewed through four singles, each arriving with an official video—each one a different doorway into the album’s world.“Am I a Knife,” released in April, announced Whisper Doll’s signing to Take Care Records. The track pairs twinkling synths with a driving bassline and a thunderous chorus where Tagami sings, “Oh, take me as I am, Oh, you know that you can,” cutting into the tension between being seen and being consumed—how the male gaze can sever reality from feminine desire, and how selfhood can become something you have to defend. “Bluebells” followed in early summer alongside the album announcement, leaning into melodic pop with upbeat riffs and a dreamlike, hopeful glow. Its Alice in Wonderland-inspired video—shot on Bard’s campus—mirrors the song’s sense of wonder, like stepping into a brighter version of your own imagination.

In August came “So Sweet,” a delicate, otherworldly track that finds Tagami returning to her childhood home and, in the quiet of that return, discovering a new kind of inner peace. The video, co-directed by Tagami and Owen Lehman (Geese, MX LONELY, Lip Critic)—who has directed every visual in the Lucky Clover era—unfolds on an elementary school theater stage, where two distant lovers stumble into a shared reality like it’s been waiting for them all along.

And in September, “Sunsigns” arrived as the final tease—a whirlwind of a new crush, restless and searching, looking to the sun, moon, and stars for meaning. Glistening guitars spiral beneath Tagami’s propulsive vocals as the band chases that specific kind of longing: the kind that makes you believe the universe is trying to tell you something. Co-directed by Tagami and Sage Leopold (Venetian Blinds), the video turns to tarot cards for answers—because sometimes you don’t want certainty, you just want a sign.

With Lucky Clover, Whisper Doll sounds like they’ve stopped trying to shrink their feelings down to something manageable. This is dream-pop that doesn’t drift away—it stays, it pulses, it insists. A record about softness that isn’t weakness, about sweetness that doesn’t cancel out complexity, about luck that feels less like chance and more like alignment. If Perfume Garden was the beginning of the story, Lucky Clover is the moment the world around it comes into focus—full-band, full-city, full heart.