This July, Salt Lake City-based songwriter Josaleigh Pollett will release their new album If I Let It Quiet via Audio Antihero and Lavender Vinyl. Following 2023’s In the Garden, By the Weeds (an album we described as “an excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause”), the record represents something of a new stage for the project, with Pollett’s key collaborator Jordan Watko having since relocated to Japan. But rather than allow the development to hamper their work, Pollett and Watko instead leant into the new circumstances, seeing their separation as fertile ground for the new release.
“This album is an exploration of what it takes to quiet the noise of geographical and emotional distance in order to hear ourselves and the ones who see us,” Pollett explains. “In true independent DIY fashion and similar to 2023’s In The Garden, By The Weeds, If I Let It Quiet is recorded mostly at home between my Salt Lake City makeshift home studio and Jordan’s apartment in Japan. The difference this time is that we’re bringing in more collaborations . In particular, Andrew Goldring, who in addition to mixing and mastering, brought deeper instrumentation to If I Let It Quiet.”
The first taste of If I Let It Quiet came towards the end of 2025 with ‘Radio Player’. “Inspired in part by seeing Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist as a child, ‘Radio Player’ explores ideas of memory and childhood with all the unease of a horror movie, its soundscape strange and suggestive and moving with a kind of dream logic,” we wrote in our preview. “A place full of images, threat and possibility, the complexities of life reduced to their fundamentals. A meditation on a time we perceive as a kind of heightened experience, one which imprints itself somewhere near the back of our minds and often surfaces without warning. Something that’s a form of haunting in its own right.”
Now Josaleigh Pollett has returned with brand new single ‘The Witness’ to further whet appetites for the album, and the song is no less striking than its predecessor. But where ‘Radio Player’ submerged itself in atmospheric ambiguity, ‘The Witness’ is altogether more lucid. A track delivered with candid clarity, as though from eyes recently opened for the first time in too long. Again themes of identity are central, but though there’s a certain amount of retrospection, this is a track rooted firmly within the present. One which tries to confront reality, learn to love it not in spite of its complexity but because of it. “Could it be that we arrived at truer places / once we stopped following the map?” as one verse puts it. “Couldn’t arrive at myself without you / maybe you could feel like that?” As Pollett expands: “’The Witness’ is a song about knowing that to be seen and held and understood, you must first see and hold and understand. It’s about love, beyond limits and gender, across multiple universes. It’s also a little bit about deleting my Twitter account.”
Photo by P.J. Guinto, album art images by Lonny Starsky, layout design and art by Helvetica Blanc