With her popularity on the rise, spoken word artist and activist Andrea Gibson released her sixth studio album on October 8, 2013. With her release date being pushed back week after week, fans were excited to finally get their hands on Truce.

As a fan myself, I have been waiting for this album to drop for over two years since her last album came out. After having the opportunity to watch her perform in Flagstaff, Arizona in late August and hearing some samples of her new album, I was pleasantly surprised with her new material and already had my opinion on it without even hearing the full album yet.

Gibson leads the album with the poem “Honey,” which is an ode to the woman she loves, by pointing out all the beauty in her love’s flaws and the beauty she brings to everything she comes in contact with. While the album starts on a happy note, the mood drastically changes when it transitions to the second track “The Nutritionist,” where she sheds light on teen suicide and uses the poem as a message to her fans. In the poem she relates a teenager’s life to an everyday adult’s, showing the relation between feelings and that how no matter who you are, there’s always someone feeling the same way. Even though “The Nutritionist” was released as a single back in 2008, it was placed on this album as a promotion for her new cause, Stay Here With Me, which is a website dedicated to suicide prevention. The website is filled with a number of poems to help teens through their problems and a 24 hour chat site to talk to people in a similar situation.

Truce is an album inspired by Gibson’s hardships in life and how she has overcome, which makes the album very dark and personal. She voices her opinions on the social injustices in today’s society and makes her stance known to the listener with her poem “When the Bough Breaks.”

To break away from her darker poems, Gibson included “A letter to my dog Exploring the Human Condition,” which is a comedic love letter she wrote to her dog, Squash. Also featured on the album is a poem called “Panic Button Collector” that explores Gibson’s own OCD and how she goes to extreme measures to avoid the unavoidable, like staring people in the eye or hearing water drip.

Overall, Truce was a fantastic, well assembled, and well produced album. I think that it will continue to be successful as more people listen to it, and  the name Andrea Gibson will become more well known by teenagers and adults worldwide.