These themes are apparent from the very beginning. Opener ‘The Ground Here’ is rich with a sense of place both past and present, longing for the familiar rhythm of distinct seasons, and centring on the anxiety of living through human-induced destruction. Houdei wrote the track following a move from her home in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri to Topanga in southern California, an area devastated by the Palisades wildfire in early 2025. “[The California] landscape is undeniably beautiful,” she explains. “I, however, being painfully aware of how strained the land had grown to be during years that I lived there, longed for natural bodies of water and the simple rainstorm.”

Why must I be quiet
I have grown to long to doubt
The ground here’s turned to dust yeah
All the lizards running about
I walk in search of grassland but the hills have all burned down
I see it in my reflection
May the river wash me out

It is not just the name of the record that is important to this release. This Bed Was Made For Me is Biita Houdei’s first release under her own new name (her given name is Lisa, and she previously recorded under the moniker LéPonds), which was gifted by her aunt and translates from Farsi as “unique”. “I proudly take this name,” Houdei says of receiving this gift. “It makes me feel that much closer to my Persian heritage.” One of the strengths of the collection is the melding of influences, pulling in threads of this family heritage and weaving them into Houdei’s own, very much American, lived experience. What sound like timeless US folk songs take surprising turns, adorned with gentle orchestral elements and playful flourishes. ‘Frog Song’ has the whimsical simplicity of a children’s rhyme, while ‘Burnin’ is suffused with the slow build and incense-scented atmosphere of a ritual, Houdei’s voice moving from whisper to full-throated cries. Each track rewarding those who give it the space and time of repeated listens, eschewing the contemporary urge to seize attention with blunt force to instead foster a more collaborative relationship between artist and listener, one of mutual attention, curiosity and wonder.

Far from a solo endeavour, collaboration was key to the creation of the record too. Celebrated songwriter Haley Heynderickx, who leads on production for the first time in her career, is a central presence in the songs. The pair met when Houdei opened for Heynderickx in 2018, a moment that sparked a strong bond and creative synergy. Before making This Bed Was Made for Me they headed to rural Oregon for a writing retreat, and upon their return brought the same sense of cosy solitude and connection to the studio. The songs came into being over the course of ten days which Houdei says “began with fermented tea and ended with a shared meal together,” the recording process a practical embodiment of the spirit of an album all about the ways in which we shape, and are in turned shaped by, one another and the world around us.

More than a neat anecdote, this origin story feels fundamental to the very sound of the release. How else to bring an album of careful, patient songs to life other than a careful, patient process? Because more than the ten days in the studio, This Bed Was Made for Me was crafted in the slow forging of a friendship over eight years, not to mention the life lived before it. Even the preparation of tea and sharing of a meal together feels important in this light, the album earning its authenticity by stacking moment upon painstaking moment with no thought of cutting corners in the name of efficiency.

The mindset is evoked most clearly in a parallel project Houdei undertook alongside the record, sewing a patch for each tracks, and then combining them into the quilt you can see on the cover. “Making the quilt was laborious. Taking the cover photo was laborious’ says Houdei. “No shortcuts, but rather a manual and tangible approach. I am thankful for the time it took.” Because, more than a prop for the artwork, the finished object became a tangible symbol the ethos of the album, one particularly poignant in this age of automation. “I encourage people to dive deeper into everything that they choose to consume,” she continues. “It is not my intention to sound pretentious, but instead, I am trying harder to explain the gratitude I have for being able to craft every part of this album— using my hands, my brain, my voice, my visions. To me, it is an all encompassing work of art.”  For all of its nuanced meanings, there’s a hidden irony to the title of This Bed Was Made for Me. Because in truth, with help from a number of friends, Biita Houdei made this bed herself, and wants to remind you that your bed is there to be made too.

This Bed Was Made For Me is released via Basin Rock and Father/Daughter Records. Order it now from the Biita Houdei Bandcamp page.

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For those unfamiliar, Thomas Dollbaum combines the stylings of alt-country that are very much en vogue with a beefier brand of heartland rock, tracing a lineage back through Molina and Springsteen as far as van Zandt, though there’s another set of influences that cannot go unmentioned. A parallel bloodline of writers (think Breece D’J Pancake, Barry Hannah and Larry Brown) who capture the beauty and sorrow in an often rough and tumble Southern existence. Interestingly, arguable heir apparent Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, whose short story collection Sleepovers is one of the best contemporary example of this literary genre, writes the liner notes and has a great interview with Dollbaum in Southwest Review, which digs deeper into the album’s literary influences, from Raymond Carver to the poetry of Jay Hopler, C.D. Wright, Joy Harjo and Philip Levine.

The country-rock-album-as-short-story-collection might not be a new idea, but paired with the aforementioned immediacy with which the songs were recorded, Birds of Paradise feels less like a set of penned vignettes and more like short glimpses at lives themselves. Each song drops the listener alongside its characters within their Southern homeland, people often on the margins of society, eking out a living within the transient space between a lost past and unknown future. Lead single ‘Dozen Roses’, arriving after the subdued and tender opener ‘Visitation’, plays like the album’s mission statement in this regard. A meditation on loss and the soothing wonder of the natural world that’s full of taut energy and forward motion, even while the narrator cycles back to the same sentiment, repeating themselves with increasing urgency.

When you were still around
I’d carry you across the river
I’d ramble through the dark until the time would deliver
Before the time would deliver

Many of the songs on Birds of Paradise are repetitive in this way, swinging back around to the same verses as if Dollbaum is working through thoughts in real time, lingering over memories both positive and not so much. This internal world provides a neat counterbalance to the present tense of many of the tracks which is altogether more transient. Our narrator(s) look for sure ground in the uncertainty of the in-between, or at least acceptance that the time spent on the “backroads leading to I-95” or “rambling through the pines” is not so much a path towards something as the body of life itself. Poignant closer ‘Blue Meets Blue’ confronts the idea head on, an ostensibly a fatalistic track (“There’s nowhere to go this is just a circle,” as Dollbaum sings, “there’s nowhere to run this is just landlocked blues”) that transforms acquiescence into a kind of charged catharsis.

It’s not too much of a reach to say this cyclical nature evokes another of the album’s key themes. Imagery of nature is abundant, and its rhythms extend across the songs as a backdrop to the very human emotions that often take centre stage. A place choked with vine and timber, where the waterbirds are strange and tall and coyotes howl at night. You only have to peek at the album art (an incredible embroidered quilt by Cora Nimtz) to understand the kind of picture Dollbaum paints across the record. Nature as something vivid and precious and undeniably peculiar, like some half-understood miracle which happens to occur all around. Yet, true to its setting, Birds of Paradise has dirt beneath its fingernails. Wonder and violence sit side by side. No more directly than on ‘Rabbits’, where the childhood innocence and bursting life is depicted as its own inversion, kids running through the burnt fields of Okeechobee with iron bars, trying to beat their siblings to the song’s titular prey as their mother watches on, keeping count.

This same mix of animation, desperation, melancholy and absurdity run through many of the songs, regardless of their subject matter. Take ‘King’s Landing’, with its childhood dream of a pilot’s license and the freedom it offers giving way to the mundane (“So lets go home and watch Judge Joe Brown / And reruns of Cops episodes in our home town”), though without ever extinguishing the desire and imagination which kicked off the fantasy in the first place. Or ‘Pulverize’, where a narrator fights the urge to look back through forward motion, then ‘Coyote’, where stasis seems to hold latent potential, as though some drastic act might materialise out of boredom itself. ‘Big Boi’ sees a teenaged Dollbaum act as chauffeur for a feuding couple strung out and desperate and looking to score. “Big Boi showed me his tattoos all down his arms,” Dollbaum sings, “said he got his nickname for being so goddamn large,” before switching the tone several shades darker, painting the titular character as a victim of the opioid crisis with the deft brevity of a poet.

Scars all from the emergency room
Asked me if I could fill a script too
Says he’s in a lot of pain right now
Who am I to say no to him anyhow?

Dollbaum might have recorded the album in the blink of an eye, but these are songs born of a lifetime in the worlds they inhabit. Places ignored by many, full of the kind of sensations we all too often forget. The dejection and sadness, yes, plus the weight of aborted dreams and all associated regrets, but also a nascent wonder which sits at the edge of our vision. A peculiar light which illuminates the future, colours the pictures of our memories. This might be human or mystical or else just something out in the wild, but we would do better if only we looked for it. Even if it can never really offer a satisfactory answer to whatever afflictions we’re called to bear. “I know you never believed / And me not in a long while,” as Dollbaum sings on opener ‘Visitation’, a fitting conclusion if you view the album as a cycle in itself. “But the older I get, the more I do magical thinking / About how the birds ride out on the sky / How the echoes hang out in the wind / How them ghosts are here in the light/ But you cant talk to any of them.”

Birds of Paradise is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Thomas Dollbaum Bandcamp page.

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With a string of festival dates on the horizon, including Green Man, The End of the Road and Boia in St. David’s, The Cindys are back with brand new single ‘Glass Shattered’ to dig further into this style. An upbeat slice of indie pop buoyed by a peppy rhythm, the track opens with a fun call and response exchange between Ogborne and Bock, though soon their vocals combine into a lush harmony, embodying the spirit of a project all about individual voices working to dial into the same shared tone. “Glass Shattered is our baptism into the world of pop songwriting,” as the band explain. “As a group we experience intense joy from performing music together, we aim to write and shape our songs with the primary purpose of them being a template to facilitate that joy and excitement. ‘Glass Shattered’ is a prime example of that. There’s nothing challenging about the song, it just wants to hit.”

Watch the video by JJ Jarman below:

‘Glass Shattered’ is out now via Breakfast Records and available from The Cindys Bandcamp page.

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We introduced the Dog Shaped sound back in June with a preview of their debut EP Reason, single ‘Please Hold’ “confront[ing],” as we put it, “the needling doubt of fearing you are too much for those around you while pining for acceptance and connection.” An embodiment of the emotionally resonant style of the band, the track sat somewhere between aching ballad and folk rock jam, utilising the full potential of its stacked line-up to conjure real detail and depth.

Now Reason has been released, it is clear the entire EP operates with this same combination of vivid atmosphere and raw delivery. Take ‘Transit’, a folk song which opens with all the hushed weight of an empty room. The intensity of the track ebbs and flows in line with Cabarle’s vocals but never quite spills over, lending a tension which further ups the stakes of the confessional, ruminative tone. ‘Isn’t It’ seems lighter at first but is by no means lacking in feeling, foregrounding more of a country twang, though it soon becomes apparent that tension is again a key facet. And, unlike its predecessor, this track is not unafraid to simmer over, the back half spiralling into something with tangible size and heft. Together, the pair of tracks serve as a great outline for Reason as a whole—held together by a sense of cohesion yet willing to push the boundaries of the Dog Shaped sound.

Reason is out now and available from the usual places.

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The songs of Between the Morning were not the only material recorded during that period, and now Richard Tripps has returned with new EP Stone Eating Animals, a release which both concludes that period of his career and further lets us into the world he has created. The title track “shows the result is every bit as evocative and atmospheric as we’ve come to expect,” we wrote in a preview back in June. “A playful, swaggering slice of slacker rock from the coastal mountains of California, delivered with something between carefree buoyancy and a more ambiguous sense of reflection.”

Now the entire EP has been released and the rest of the songs are just as impressive, switching up the tempo while maintaining the overall ambience. Opener ‘Objects Are Closer’ sits at the energetic end of the spectrum, a song which manages to pair racing rhythm with enveloping fuzz, packing a punch while maintaining a languid slacker cool. But any laidback vibe is blown away by the subsequent tracks, which are practically horizontal in comparison. ‘I Wanna Be The Moth’ moseys along like the fanciful flutter of its titular insect, while ‘You Me and Julie’ and ‘Tall Grass’ offer a similarly charming sunbaked flow. All of the tracks are recorded via Tascam 424 Portstudio and are stronger for it, the woozy tones and matte finish again evoking a landscape in which the real and surreal merge into something as tactile as it is strange.

Stone Eating Animals is out now and available from the Richard Tripps Bandcamp page.

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red birds on a branch furthers this style. Each track is a snapshot, or rather a specific scene suspended. A moment or memory frozen in time yet still possessing all its dimensions. The listener is invited to step inside these tableaus, not only to explore the fine details therein, but also imagine the narratives which have led to that picture, as well as that which is yet to unfold.

The entire effect is captured within the very first moments of opening track ‘Spiral Kitchen Linoleum’. “Unopened mail by the microwave,” Rogers sings over a warm and wistful arrangement. “She sensed there’s something you wanted to say / All the words just looking for the right ones / spiral kitchen linoleum.” The precision of the imagery does more than conjure a scene. It evokes memory, yearning, fears and dreams, as though life itself is distilled in the smallest of things. Unopened mail, the hum of a refrigerator (it is fitting the next track on the record, ‘Nighthawks’, evokes Hopper). These details point to the past, yes, but also the future, its characters heading towards a difficult confrontation, the kitchen seemingly laying in wait.

The result is something of a new era for Tremolo Fields. John Ross of Wild Pink produced the release and his fingerprints are noticeable. Where still as can be had a certain off-kilter charm, red birds on a branch is richer, deeper, more complete. The rough edges of its predecessor not so much smoothed over but layered into a more cohesive whole. Be it the nocturnal glow of the aforementioned ‘Nighthawks’, where a loneliness seems to bloom into shimmering possibility, or the altogether sleeker ‘Rooftops’ and its brooding allure. Ross helps breathe an effortless complexity through the arrangements which matches the project’s overall spirit. The beguiling attraction of an image. The surface and its implicit depth.

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Back in May we shared an updated version of Hayman, Watkins, Trout And Lee, a bluegrass record which combined original material with covers of genre classics, and hinted that the release might be the start of a wider project to unearth the full depth of Darren Hayman’s substantial back catalogue and reinvigorate it for the digital age. This process has quietly continued across recent weeks. Previously missing titles from Hefner have reappeared via his own imprint Belka, as well as releases from The French, The Secondary Modern and his debut solo EP Cortinaland, meaning a long-needed sense of order is starting to emerge within Hayman’s online presence. The work of this kaleidoscopic and shape-shifting artist finally catalogued in one place.

But the crowning achievement of this mission is the release of an expanded edition of 2012’s The Violence. Among one of Darren Hayman’s most ambitious undertakings, The Violence is complex and emotionally resonant concept album centring on the English Civil War and the contemporaneous witch trials across East Anglia. With a sound brought to life by a vast ensemble of musicians going by the name The Long Parliament, the record digs right into the violence and superstitions of the period, tracing a country pulled apart by misplaced fervour, illusions of moral superiority, pernicious rumours and the old-fashioned desire for power. A society, that is, very different from our own, yet governed by familiar forces. One in which fear and ignorance curdle into something terrible, and act as a cover for those who wish to enact ideas of cruelty and greed. “The beliefs and fears that led to the Witch Trials are taken from the Puritan idea that it is wrong to glorify or look upon God’s image directly. Taken to its absolute extreme, only the blind were seen as truly pure, and ungodliness was perceived to be everywhere,” Hayman explains:

Evil never thinks of itself as such, and people can act cruelly when frightened. I assume that Matthew Hopkins, the self-named ‘Witch Finder General’ believed, on some level, that he was acting on God’s instruction. In early 1645, Hopkins pushed his ear to his window and overheard conversations between supposed witches. Elizabeth Clarke, a one-legged, 80-year-old widow, was the first to be accused and arrested.

Hopkins claimed that 3 days and nights of ‘watching’ led Elizabeth Clarke to ‘confess many things’; furthermore, that his interrogation witnessed the summoning of numerous hideous imps and demons. Clarke confessed to sleeping with the devil and also pointed the finger at other women in the parish, including Anne West and her daughter Rebecca. All of these women were single or widowed beggars and perceived to be a drain on their communities.

Hopkins began offering his services to other towns. For a fee, he would help rid these communities of their ‘witches’

The expanded edition of The Violence comes complete with its companion EP The Four Queens, plus several unreleased songs and demos. “It’s so important to me to have this record available again. It’s the hardest I’ve ever worked, and I believe it sounds like nothing else in my back catalogue,” Hayman explains. “I write easily about modernity and pepper my lyrics with slang, brand names, and colloquialisms. I wanted to write about something in Essex’s past that spoke of its strangeness and also forced me to write in a language suitable for another period.”

The Violence (Expanded Edition) is out now and available from the Darren Hayman Bandcamp page.

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Or perhaps not despite the clarity of the title, because while the thicket of feelings might be disorientating to experience, Brown maps this complexity with such precision and care that a sense of order starts to emerge. Meaning, as the album progresses, we follow her characters out of this tangle of interpersonal relations towards something enticingly close to lucidity, if not outright epiphany.

To ground this thematic arc, Izzy Oram Brown has shared two singles from the end of the record to hint at just where What I Want ends up. And, more than that, the songs also serve to demonstrate how this mission extends beyond the lyrics to the very sound itself. Multi-instrumentalist Jesse Bielenberg (Altopalo, Jesse in Grey, Dora Jar) and drummer Connor Parks (Cafune, Little Mystery, Tony Vaz) join to elevate the arrangements, and the fittingly layered and complex results align perfectly with the emotional weather through which Brown’s characters move. “Far from sounding like a typical indie-folk songwriter record,” Winston Cook-Wilson writes in the album notes, “What I Want is full of synth comet-streaks and fiery bits of unidentifiable sonic debris that function like musical evocations of both life’s unwelcome surprises and unprecedented wonders.”

First comes penultimate track ‘Love U the Same’, a warm, acoustic pop number which plays as though emerging from the other end of confusion within a relationship, not so much with specific answers for each and every problem but rather a kind of overarching meta-understanding. The hard won knowledge that love will always come loaded with knots and contradictions, and will likely never settle into anything close to perfection, but instead requires constant work. Closer ‘I Believe’ pushes the idea further. A track grander than its predecessor which takes this understanding and paints it in huge letters across the sky. A conclusion that feels almost defiant. “But I believe in the in between / And I believe in the starting clean,” as Brown sings in the song’s closing verse. “Well if that makes me wrong / So let it be.”

What I Want will be released on the 26th June and you can pre-order it now from the Izzy Oram Brown Bandcamp page.

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Despite this inherently personal style and subject matter, Starshiner was far from a solo endeavour. The album was written and recorded with help from Teddy Tietze and Giovanni Ventello, as well as contributions by Rob Florence (drums), Deven Raval (bass), Tucker Godbold (upright), Fraser Wright (bass and lead guitar) and Frank Stewart (pedal steel). Working with this group allowed Aubrey Jane to push her sound towards a newfound richness while still retaining that vulnerability that is central to its spirit.

Single ‘Late Winter, Early Spring’ is a great example. A slow-burn country-tinged number, it evokes the liminal space of its title to explore an equally strange middle ground between the end of a relationship and the act of actually letting go. “I stalk you on Facebook / ‘Cause I’ve got you blocked on everything / And you haven’t changed in the six years / It took for me to feel this way,” Jane sings in the opening lines, immediately establishing the emotional stakes despite the almost murmured delivery. But as the song unfurls, the instrumentation gathers into something almost thunderous and the vocals rise in tandem, as though finally a stopped-up anger can be voiced and released. The catharsis might not be powerful enough to exorcise the longing which clearly still sits at the track’s heart, and the insistence of having moved on rings hollow. But the openness of such confessions nevertheless feels like an important step in admitting the truth.

You don’t see it coming,
You’ve got a wife and a baby
You’ve all but forgotten
The fires and the ruins where you left me
And all the fresh hell,
All of the baggage that I carry
But it doesn’t hurt
It doesn’t hurt it doesn’t hurt me

The raw self-examination is not only limited to romantic histories either. One of the most moving tracks on the album, ‘Locket’ considers the absence of a parent in a typically forthright manner. “I miss my mom / I think I understand her better now / Now that I’m older I fit into her clothes, / Like facing a mirror,” as Aubrey Jane concedes in the first verse. But again the progress of the song is matched by a kind of emotional progress too, Jane coming to understand that, despite all of the water that has passed under the bridge in the intervening years, there’s still a need for maternal support. “And I know we didn’t get along so well / When I was figuring myself out for the first time,” as she sings. “But now I’m starting over and / I think I need her help.”

Starshiner is out now and available from the usual places.

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Fast forward a little under two years and Just Cause are at it again. Just Cause Vol. 2 takes the blueprint of the original and expands upon it. There are over double the number of contributing artists, with an impressive total of sixty three songs from all corners of our current musical moment. Many of the artists have featured on these very pages (some multiple times), including the likes of Ben Seretan, Caitlin Pasko, Erika Dohi, hemlock, Mal Devisa, Michael Cormier-O’Leary, Nico Hedley, Pleasure Systems and Sam Wenc. There’s such a mix of genres, feelings and styles that there truly is something for everyone, and the minimum donation of $10 is brilliant value in anyone’s book.

But of course the compilation is about more than music. It is again raising money for another vital cause. All proceeds of Just Cause Vol. 2 go to the Immigrant Defense Project, who work tirelessly to fight the mass imprisonment and deportation of immigrants in the US. As their mission statement puts it: “IDP has remained steadfast in fighting for fairness and justice for all immigrants caught at the intersection of the racially biased U.S. criminal and immigration systems. IDP fights to end the current era of unprecedented mass criminalization, detention and deportation through a multipronged strategy including advocacy, litigation, legal advice and training, community defense, grassroots alliances, and strategic communications.”

Just Cause Vol. 2 is out now and available via Bandcamp.

Cover art by Aldrin Regina Valdez

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