There’s something inherently promising when an artist announces a self-titled record that isn’t a debut. You get the sense that they have achieved something, arrived at some landmark that brings together all their previous work in some defining moment. A definitive statement on who they are and what they are trying to achieve as an artist. This is certainly the case with the new self-titled record from Jana Horn, released late last month on No Quarter. It’s the Texas native’s third LP, following 2020’s Optimism and 2023 follow-up The Window is the Dream, and offers a pure distillation of her unique take on the conventional singer-songwriter genre. The ten songs burn with a quiet confidence that signals an artist reaching the height of their power, trimming away all unnecessary fat to get to the luminous essential core.
Horn’s music career took off in Virginia, where she moved to complete an MFA in Creative Writing, but this record is concerned with the next period of her life. She moved to New York City post graduation and suffered a bewildering sense of dislocation away from family, friends and any concept of home. “Moving to New York after graduation had felt almost too right, like an arranged marriage,” Horn explains. “I was pretty unhappy for a while. My life was still in Virginia, where my friends were, in Texas, where my mother was learning to live again after years of being passed from one hospital to the next… I drifted through the city in pajamas, at midday.”
Much of the album focuses on this difficult early period in the city, a series of beginnings and endings that unfurl with a surreal dream logic, suffused with that strange loneliness of being surrounded by millions of unfamiliar faces. This atmosphere is introduced on opening track ‘Go on, move your body’, a song Horn wrote in the midst of those early NYC days that finds her hesitant and adrift. “Nothing prepares you for this,” she mumbles over minimal guitar and ponderous percussion, establishing a sparseness and patience that marks the record. The uncanny accompanying video, directed and edited by Travis Kent, reinforces all this, casting Horn (both literally and figuratively) as a strange figure in a strange city.
It should be noted that this is not an entirely solo endeavour. Horn is joined by Jade Guterman on bass and Adam Jones on drums (plus Adelyn Strei and Miles Hewitt, adding the odd flourish of clarinet/flute and piano respectively) who play with a lightness of touch that feels sympathetic to Horn’s writing. As if cautious not to break the spell by treading too heavily. ‘All in bet’, for example, could have been presented as a conventional acoustic track, just strummed guitar and Horn’s yearning vocals. But instead skittering percussion kick it along, woodwinds sigh and hum, little barrages of piano leaving glittering traces as they swoop on through.
That said, Horn is happy to at times slip from the limelight, leaving bass or drums front and centre and whispering around them as if from shadows. The record is also not entirely one-pace. Songs like ‘Designer’ might not explode in terms of tempo or volume, but nevertheless see the turbulence of that time bubble up from beneath the surface. It’s at these moments the influence of Phil Elverum is most apparent, that curious ability to write a stormy indie rock song with drums and guitar that still feels hushed and heavy with sorrow.
But the true triumph of Jana Horn are the moments of near silence. The sense that, three records in, she has learned to deliver songs with the most stringent economy, finding beauty in the moments most basic and spare. As when the guitar patters like raindrops against the soft negative space of ‘Without’, or the shyly staccato ‘Come on’, on which Horn delivers short, clipped lines in exchange for a shudder of percussion. Between both, something else seeps in. The quiet that sits at the heart of the record.
Jana Horn is out now via No Quarter and available via Bandcamp.
