Singer-songwriter Heather Aubrey Lloyd’s new album, Panic Room With a View, is set to release on October 17, 2025 with the first single, “Hometown Hero,” out now. The song is a Pop-Rock “rage scream,” which rebels against “constant dishes” and unleashed “fury” on a “disused garden.”

The song was written during the pandemic period, and Lloyd explains:

After touring widely for almost 20 years, I feared I was destined to become bitter and burned out. A ‘hometown hero’ who could’ve/should’ve been. I was a sidelined musician cut off from my passions, my purpose, and firmly stuck in my resentful new role as Rosie the Homemaker. 

Panic Room With A View follows Lloyd’s previous solo effort, 2017’s A Message in the Mess. The nine-song album was created while Lloyd was in the first few years of the pandemic, and ended up “showing defiance in the face of dreams deferred.”

Lloyd started work on her new album just as the world stopped. Then, her first recording sessions were set back by a robbery that cleaned out the entire Virginia studio she was using, just as the first songs approached the finish line.

Lloyd finally picked the project back up in January 2022. Production was delayed one last time in January 2025 when mixing engineer David Peters at Oak House Recording was two songs into final mixes when the Altadena wildfires came over his hillside. 

Lloyd shares:

A plague, a robbery, and a wildfire. Creating this album was like anxiety immersion therapy.