She’s back and more like herself

Alison Sudol, once A Fine Frenzy, opens up about her return to music after five years.

Things get personal in the songs of Alison Sudol.

She recorded three albums under the name A Fine Frenzy, singing of nature and nurturing and of love gone astray. Then, after her most ambitious recording, 2012’s “Pines,” she went quiet, as a crisis of confidence led Sudol to keep her new music private for nearly five years.

“I was making music consistently,” Sudol, 33, said recently about that time. “I was just terrified to release it.”

Five years are an eternity for a young artist, but then she found unexpected success as an actress, first with a recurring role in Season 1 of “Transparent,” and now, more spectacularly, as the magical, empathetic Queenie in the “Fantastic Beasts” series of Harry Potter prequels.

Her life in the J.K. Rowling universe is in full swing with the recent release of “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” but she’s also back as a musician with two EPs: the just-released “Moon” and, in early 2019, “Moonlite.”

“For me, music is much more life and death,” says Sudol, relaxed in a white top and jeans, her hair a pale blond, over lunch at the Sunset Tower Hotel. “It was as if part of me was dying, and I was trying to figure it out. My heart gets tight, and it’s almost like my soul gets congested if I’m not making music.”

Now recording under her