“An exercise in improvisation built entirely on trust, the record sees the duo lay down patient yet detailed guitar-based duets, and the result is something organic in the way only true intimacy could manage.” That’s how we described Doubles, the debut album from Duffy x Uhlmann, back in 2023. The project, consisting of Meg Duffy (of Hand Habits, Perfume Genius) and Gregory Uhlmann (who you might know from albums such as Extra Stars, or projects like SML), has always been built upon a sense of shared understanding, though their new full-length Hot Creek, coming next month via Orindal Records, pushes this relationship even further.
Working in the spirit of what poet Adrienne Rich has labelled “a dream of a common language,” Hot Creek sees Duffy x Uhlmann celebrate and deepen their relationship, again using two guitars and leaning into the instinctive energy which sparks between two trusting musicians. The record takes its title from Hot Creek in Mono County, California, and uses the site as a thematic cornerstone. For just as a geothermal spring is both contained by the land and capable of shaping it, the music of Duffy and Uhlmann seems at once controlled by its creators and somehow controlling them, the act of playing a mutual relationship between the art and the artist where neither emerges quite the same as before. As you might expect, the result has an organic quality very different from the atmosphere on its predecessor. Playing with ideas of change and repetition, climax and understatement.
Ahead of the release this August, Duffy x Uhlmann have shared two tracks, ‘Doing It for Me’ and ‘Public Life’. The former, being the opening track, plays something like an introduction, the dual guitars circling one another as though renewing their familiarity, while ‘Public Life’ finds them closer than ever. An ostensibly restrained, meandering number which nevertheless carries the suggestion of something deeper. A subterranean double of itself lurking underneath.
Hot Creek on the 14th August via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now.
Album cover art by Christina Huang, photo by Harrison Whitford