Working under the moniker Half Shadow, Jesse Carsten has spend over a decade crafting a mysterious, slightly mystical style of folk music. “An uncanny marriage between personal insight and a wider mystical experience” was how we described 2022 release At Home With My Candles. A collection of songs that “could be called poems,” as we continued, “or perhaps spells or charms, incantations delivered into quiet spaces to summon strange and nameless things.” Then came 5 New Songs of Half Shadow in 2023, which presented, as we wrote, “the sense of an artist stepping beyond their desire to rework and overthink, not to mention drawing oblique lines between seemingly unconnected things so get at some deeper level of meaning.”
This spring sees Half Shadow return with Wind Inside, a brand new four-song EP to be released via Antiquated Future Records, and Carsten again evolves their craft to further probe into life’s ambiguities, be they earthy or ethereal. Living up to the project name, these are songs which exist between light and dark, not in a crepuscular sense but rather embracing both simultaneously. Personal experience made cryptic by shadows of grief, or nocturnal poems which glow like dreams.
Lead single ‘Fruit’ offers a first glimpse inside, straddling folk, pop and rock sensibilities to evoke a sound full of seasonal change. The fitting backdrop for what is a meditation on personal growth and the patience which is required to embrace its non-linear shape. “This too shall bear fruit,” Carsten sings in the opening lines, “but until then, just as you said / ‘we must all learn to bare the fallow field’.”
Wind Inside will be released on the 6th March via Antiquated Future Records and you can pre-order it now from the Half Shadow Bandcamp page.
