Now Sasha Adrian is back with brand new single ‘wish that i had called u’, which again reimagines the traditional boundaries of a love song to explore a form of relationship not so often explored. Namely the incredibly close bond formed between teenage friends, where every emotion is heightened and you are certain the relationship will continue perpetually. The result uses an upbeat alt-rock tone to capture these feelings, though also countershades this mood with something more wistful and reflective, meaning the result is both an ode to the old days and a nostalgic slice of longing for a time which can never return. “We thought we knew it all, and we had no idea it wouldn’t be like that forever,” Adrian explains. “You can’t help but wonder if you could have held on just a little longer. But at the same time, it’s just an incredible era to look back on for exactly what it was—deeply loving, funny, free, and defining for who we became.”

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However, Hockitay’s latest single ‘two crows’ is something different. Not so much a pivot from its predecessors as an attempt to reclaim the old organic world from the automated present. As the title suggests, the track draws upon the traditional augury of a pair of crows, supposedly an omen of good luck and partnership, to counter an otherwise hostile environment, looking to push beyond the modern confines of finances or even the looming weight of personal mortality to find comfort in the grander, more enduring cycles of nature.

Watch the video directed by David S. Blouin and Buvard below:

‘two crows’ is out now via Future Gods and available from the Hockitay Bandcamp page.

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Max Wood’s applied communications made a splash back in the noughties, with albums like africa baby, yeah yeah yeah and uhhh sort of winning attention with their singular personality and often chaotic arrangements, though subsequently turned away from music for the next two decades. Only, in a turn of events the 2005-era Wood couldn’t have ever imagined, a TikTok-user-cum-internet-archaeologist unearthed the old releases and revived interest, essentially resuscitating applied communications twenty years after its apparent death. After a pair of EPs in recent times, Wood is now preparing a full-length, and latest single ‘cowboy bebop & eric’s trip’ gives a glimpse at this strange phoenix as it rises from the flames. A characteristically off-the-wall and hyperactive slice of electronic (anti-)pop that comes with all the playfulness and intensity of its predecessors. “I sometimes find myself trying to fit into groups or scenes that seem cool to me, even if (especially if??) I’m going to flail and be weird and feel rejected and get depressed,” Wood explains of the track. “I didn’t mean to write a song about that dynamic, but I think that’s what happened here. I also just wanted to try making a jangly guitar-centered indie rock song because I’ve never been able to pull that off before. I still didn’t pull it off, but I’m proud of the glitchy mess that resulted from the attempt.”

atmos bloom – Everything

London-based duo atmos bloom are set to return this summer with Everythingness, a brand new album on Spirit Goth Records which looks to build upon the dreamy, shoegaze-inflected bedroom pop aesthetic of their previous release Flora. There’s an inherently nostalgic sensibility to this style of music, but Tilda Gratton and Curtis Paterson craft something caught between reflection and forward motion, charting the sometimes difficult space between youth and adulthood, looking to push life in new directions while pining for the old days too. Lead single and not quite title track ‘Everything’ embodies this mood, capturing the sense of flux which marks the entire release. ‘Everything’ explores “the impossible task of trying to be everything all at once, balancing all that life throws at you whilst trying to find yourself and your place amidst it all,” the band explain. “The song explores young adulthood and figuring out the transition between adolescence and womanhood, working through a mountain of contradictory advice and solutions. ‘Everything’ feels like walking a tightrope, wanting to do one thing for one reason and something else for another, knowing each decision pulls you further in a different direction.”

Everythingness will be released on the 24th July via Spirit Goth Records and you can pre-order it now.

Atta Boy – Full Cloud

Back in May we introduced Silt, the forthcoming full-length from LA indie rock outfit Atta Boy with ‘Oh, Mama’, “a song,” as we put it, “which holds up the unique force that is motherly love as something as organic and ever-present as the natural world itself.” With the album’s release now less than a month away, Atta Boy have returned with ‘Full Cloud’ to further establish its mood and themes. With a characteristically upbeat pop-inflected rock style, the single navigates a difficult relationship and all its hidden currents. The tension between the slow suffocation of dependency and the fear of drifting apart (“Leave me alone / Don’t make me your lifeboat,” as one telling verse goes). There might not be a solution within the frame of the track, but it is cathartic to voice such frustrations all the same.

I live here with a full cloud
That never learned to let go of the rain
So it held onto every memory
I am not a cloud
So I will never understand
The very burden of the skies
And all your enemies

Silt will be released on the 26th June and you can pre-order it now.

Grace Cummings – My God

This summer celebrated Australian songwriter Grace Cummings will release Bloodhorse!, the much anticipated follow-up to her acclaimed third album Ramona. “A bloodhorse is a horse expected to be a winner,” Cummings explains of the title, “but they can often also be temperamental, fearful, fragile and easily broken. Sometimes I feel like I’m a trapped animal. And, when I go to sleep, sometimes it’s like I’m in the gate, twitching. And as soon as I open my eyes, I’m fucking running.” Such fight-or-flight energy drives the record, Cummings leaving no stone unturned in her exploration of her own dreams and dreads, no matter how hideous or provocative the result might be. Yet such honesty is less cheap provocation and more an attempt to regain agency within an otherwise restrictive existence, as though to describe the suffocating sensation of living in the plainest of terms is in some way lessen its hold. Listen to single ‘My God’ now, a song “about hatred, jealousy, rage,” as Cumming continues. “The God here is the dark forces that are wrapping around us, that we scroll through, the toxic energy that binds us together in this modern world, and the fear we feed it every day.”

Watch the video filmed and directed by Ben Ulitzka Portnoy below:

Bloodhorse! will be released on the 14th August on ATO Records and you can pre-order it now.

koleżanka – Lessons in Textiles

Aside from her work as part of Foyer Red, Kristina Moore also records solo under the moniker koleżanka, most recently with 2023 full-length Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes on Bar/None Records which emerged from the COVID era to offer “a delicate line between peace and unease,” as we described in our review. “A sensation which fades against the wider tragedy of the pandemic yet resonates deeply all the same,” we continued, “for life’s relentless motion eased for some, and new ways of living began to suggest themselves.” Now koleżanka is back with ‘Lessons in Textiles’, a new single which draws on Moore’s interest in knitting to weave a metaphor for the personal transformations which so often accompany grief. Namely the technique of unravelling (or ‘frogging’) a knit in order to rework the stitches, the song describing a person not only undone by loss but slowly fashioned into something new.

Leilani Patao – kiddy scissors

Last year Hawaiian-American songwriter, broadcaster and engineer Leilani Patao put out daisy, an EP on Audio Antihero which shunned social media and streaming services and thus came to possess, as we wrote in our review, “that emotional authenticity which marked the earlier generations of bedroom pop which relied on little beyond word of mouth” (making the list of our favourite releases of 2025 as a result). Capitalising on the success of the release, Patao is now sharing a brand new deluxe edition of the EP, with the original album tracks joined by three new songs as well as remixes from the likes of Benjamin Shaw and Magana. One of the new cuts, ‘kiddy scissors’, has been unveiled now to whip up excitement, and the song is every bit as tender and genuine as fans will have come to expect. A celebration of “queer joy and trans love,” the single is in many ways the embodiment of Leilani Patao more generally. A song able to evoke the grandest of emotions without resorting to melodrama or spectacle, instead opting to elevate the ordinary, intimate moments of the everyday.

Nathan El – Jubilee // Her Bright Smile Still Haunts Me

Recording under the moniker Nathan El, Pittsburgh-based agriculturalist and musician Nathan Blake creates folk music which looks backwards while moving forward, taking the traditional forms of the genre and reshaping them to conjure something new. Latest release Jubilee // Her Bright Smile Still Haunts Me demonstrates just how Nathan El achieves this, Blake adding ambient tones to deepen and distort classic arrangements, with Claire Sweeney adding supporting vocals as well as fiddle and harmonium. An American traditonal, ‘Jubilee’ opens as something slow and reflective, though kicks into a toe-tapping alt-country number before returning back to its spacious textures, evoking both the romance and melancholy of humble living as time ticks away. ‘Her Bright Smile Still Haunts Me’ reimagines an old English song to similar effect, though this time favours a richer palette despite the aching longing at its heart. Both songs, much like the Nathan El project itself, aim to reconjure the past within the present, unable or unwilling to relinquish that which used to be, and in the process blur the distinction between love and loss.

Jubilee // Her Bright Smile Still Haunts Me is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Richard Tripps – Stone Eating Animals

“Channel[s] the lo-fi aesthetic of The Range of Light, The Velvet Underground, White Fence and early Oh Sees in order to better evoke the environment where the songs were conceived,” we wrote of Richard Tripps‘s 2024 release Between the Morning, Tripps recording a batch of material in his tent cabin in Big Sur and allowing the sense of place to bleed into the songs themselves. This July, Tripps will share a brand new EP which collects the last of the tracks from that period, and single ‘Stone Eating Animals’ shows the result is every bit as evocative and atmospheric as we’ve come to expect. A playful, swaggering slice of slacker rock from the coastal mountains of California, delivered with something between carefree buoyancy and a more ambigious sense of reflection.

‘Stone Eating Animals’ is out now and available from the usual places. The EP will be released on the 12th July.

Taifa Nia – Spellz

You might know Bay Area artist Taifa Nia as the frontman of Same Girls, guitar player in Ricky Lake, founder of Portion Club or collaborator with artists like Brontez Purnell, though he has now decided to record solo under his own name as a newly personal creative outlet. Debut EP Avaratia shows the kind of honesty which marks his dream pop-inflected style of indie rock. “Avaratia is the latin term for greed,” Nia explains. “I look back on this time of my life and I feel ashamed for the level of greed I had. I didn’t realize I had so much, I had creative people around me, I had effortless love that transmuted into effortless art, and everyday I was surrounded by a place that felt the same way. Yet for some reason I was always looking for more, a new home, a bigger stage, bigger achievements, more money than I needed.” The album follows this mindset towards its alienating end, finding Nia slowly being humbled by his surroundings, and coming to realise he’s moved away from himself in pursuit of material luxuries and acclaim. Listen to single ‘Spellz’ now:

Van Chamberlain – The Right Line

Van Chamberlain are continuing to release singles from their forthcoming full-length As Far As the Eye Can See, following tracks like ‘Miracle Drug‘, ‘‘Solutions‘ and ‘Running Through the World‘ with latest cut, ‘The Right Line’. The record has possessed a decidedly bittersweet tone to date and the new single is certainly no exception, showing that life’s big questions can be confronted with richness and groove. “There was a point where it seemed like everyone around me was going through it at the same time,” Van Chamberlain explains. “I didn’t have any of the answers, but I wanted to be a positive force. This is a song about wanting to give the people around you a reason to smile. It’s easy to write a song about what you’re going through. This time I wanted to write a song for everyone else.”

Wild Pink – Round Of Applause At The End Of The World

Following on from their critically acclaimed 2024 album Dulling the Horns, Wild Pink are returning this summer with brand new full-length Still Coming Down. Much water has passed beneath the bridge from when we first covered the band over a decade ago, with lead John Ross overcoming serious illness and later becoming a father, not to mention a changing musical style which has veered from raucous indie rock to more cinematic, electronic-based arrangements and back again. Yet throughout this time, there’s always been a consistent spirit to the Wild Pink project which is rooted in Ross’s distinctive lyricism. Still Coming Down retains this spirit while pushing the writing further than ever, capturing contemporary America in all of its chaos, confusion and mundanity. Like DeLillo, Ellroy and Mailer before him, lead single ‘Round Of Applause At The End Of The World’ sees Ross succumb to the masculine urge to write about JFK, Oswald and Jack Ruby, painting a swirling picture of conspiracy that undermines even the most trusted facets of society.

Still Coming Down will be released on the 21st August via Fire Talk and you can pre-order it now.

Wolfschmidt – whaler

“An epic alt rock number which faces up to feelings of stasis with a combination of hope and fatalism, looking to break free even while the same cycles seem to repeat.” So we wrote of Wolfschmidt‘s recent single ‘file’, the Gothenburg outfit utilising a propulsive quiet-loud dynamic to achieve cathartic heights. With album INSUFFICIENT FAILURE coming soon, the band have returned with follow-up ‘whaler’ to further introduce themselves. Again it’s the drama and energy which first grabs the attention, but, revolving around ideas of self-sacrifice for the greater good, there’s a meaty thematic side to the track too. A collision of chaos and ordered flow not unlike the marine environment suggested by the title, with the listener invited to take a deep breath and submerge themselves too.

Dive in
Meet me where I end
And you start
Whale fall
Dive in
I descend
Where you are

‘whaler’ is out now and available from the usual places. INSUFFICIENT FAILURE is coming soon.

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The first single was ‘Microwave‘, a song which finds a narrator preparing themselves in the early morning ahead of a soul crushing day working in a grocery store under whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling the present. “There’s a healthy dose of existential dread sure,” we wrote, “but there’s also enough garage rock crunch for it to feel rousing too. An anthem for the masses forced to drag themselves out of bed every morning to keep on keeping on.” Then came ‘Your God‘ which set “an exploration of friendship (or rather, the lack thereof) and religious bigotry to an upbeat, almost carefree sound,” as we put it, highlighting the interplay of lightness and weight across the album. “How you interpret this style is up to you, and both have thematic resonance: A Trojan horse where difficult subjects are broached under the guise of having fun? Or an attempt to sand some of the sharp edges from these difficult subjects so it is possible to talk about them at all?”

Now Tory Silver has now returned with brand new single ‘Boy Disco’ to pave the way for the album’s release later this week. “I’ve been thinking about death / It’s complicated and unfair,” go the opening lines. “But it’s natural / and we have to learn to live with it.” The sound is marked by a simmering energy and palpable weight, the creeping momentum like a building force that eventually has to vent. And vent the track does, intermittently breaking into squally crescendos which carry their own cathartic power, and ultimately embody the spirit of an album which faces up to the most dispiriting of life’s features and refuses to be cowed.

“This song is a stream of consciousness at heart,” they explain. “The album is about moving forward in life despite the obstacles thrown our way, and this song is where I just wrote down what I was feeling. By the end, it shifts into something more tender – a reminder of how important it is to have the right people in your life, and a hope that everyone has that. That, and it’s a freaking rock song.” Watch the video directed by Sandy Loaf below:

In Through the Front with Lasers will be released on the 29th May via Michi Tapes and you can pre-order it now.

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Released a year later, The Deadchrist pushed the jesus is a path to heaven project towards a more diverse palette while only deepening its thematic concerns. “There are elements of David Bazan in the religious guilt and fury of the lyrics, Sufjan Stevens in the soft vocals, as well as the likes of talons’ in the despondent quiet,” as our review noted, and the results was a sound able to embrace seemingly contradictory moods in one complete package. A feat inherently religious, where mortal insignificance and supernatural sublime collide into something doom-laden, unknowable and holding potential salvation. “The simultaneity of darkness and light is the spirit of the deadchrist,” we continued in our piece:

Take the pain and beauty of ‘the fawn’, where death is both an end and a beginning, or ‘lord, you called’ with its unique blend of optimism and torment. Hoban has described the jesus is the path to heaven project as one exploring the “effect religious trauma has on the human body,” though it stands apart in how it does this with such a direct engagement with Christian themes. Suffering as the central tenet of existence. Agony and love as the same thing.

This summer sees Hoban and co. return with brand new full-length Power !, and lead single ‘The Lord Has Bled A Line’ suggests a continued, ever-deepening engagement with this core aesthetic. If its predecessor could be said to have displayed marginally warmer or more personable strokes, ‘The Lord Has Bled A Line’ snaps back toward desolation. An expansive, brooding number which possesses an almost medieval air, tapping into ancient frameworks of fear and belief and dragging them into the contemporary moment. “The Lord has bled / from heart to heart, / down the Fall Line,” Hoban sings in the opening lines, his vocals appearing after five minutes of building instrumentation as though precipitating from the pregnant air. “The Lord has bled a line / a thousand miles across / the beltway of 40, / to the shoreline / where He found me.” As ever, there’s a devotional quality to the sound, though one which bends towards the apocalyptic, asking the question that seems most pertinent in the project’s entire body of work. What is it that lies at the end of the line drawn by the Lord, deliverance or damnation?

Album art buy Emily Warner

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‘May To One’, the charged, simmering new single from Nashville based songwriter and musician Anna Grace Odom, might be an inherently personal track, but that doesn’t mean it’s themes are not more widely applicable. “This song is a confession and an offering,” Odom explains. “I wrote it on my little brother’s birthday, in the spot in my childhood bedroom where I wrote every song as a teenager. I’d just finished my first year of college and was feeling like I was letting everyone down at once (family, friends, God, myself).” As she started playing the track live, a curious thing happened. Members of the audience starting approaching with their own reads of the lyrics, and how it evoked their own personal guilt and shame. It’s a reminder of the universality of such concerns, as well as the power of music to transform confessions into acts of communal release.

‘May To One’ is out now and available from the usual places.

David James Allen – The Moonlight Waltz

Back in February we wrote about ‘By Your Side’, a single by David James Allen from forthcoming album Jubilation Potpurri. “An ode to the safe harbour of a significant other,” as we described the track, “where calm might be found no matter how stormy the outside world might prove.” Now the Prince Edward County, Ontario-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has returned with brand new single ‘The Moonlight Waltz’ to further whet appetites, and this time the focus is on an attempted escape of an altogether different kind. Full of equal parts heartbreak and romance, the track is a country song in the classic sense, celebrating the potential within a good old fashioned barroom while nodding to the all too familiar loneliness which haunts the edges of such a place.

‘The Moonlight Waltz’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Fishwife – All Good Wives

The fact that Fishwife’s Lenny Moynihan and Jos Cubie first met in an oyster shack during a storm might seem like the sort of throwaway factoid that often populates a band’s bio, but in this case the origin story seems to be central to the project’s DNA. Because this is a duo that makes music bathed in shadow and charged with energy, full of an almost Gothic atmosphere that’s at once enigmatic and enveloping. Take debut single ‘All Good Wives’, which transposes Ellen Hutter’s relationship with Nosferatu onto Moynihan’s own experiences living in Los Angeles, merging the corporeal and ghostly into something as alluring as it is ambiguous. With vocals recorded in an abandoned ghost train ride and organ in a Grade II listed church, you’ll do well to find a more evocative track. Watch the video directed by Ellen Moynihan below:

‘All Good Wives’ is out now and available from the usual places.

The Huntress and Holder of Hands – Beasts We Are

“A sound that holds space for anger, confusion, sadness and compassion, as well as an inherent sense of hope that’s built into the very fact of its existence.” So we wrote of MorganEve Swain’s  The Huntress and Holder of Hands project earlier in the month, with new album Babylon representing “the perfect example of this nuanced style, confronting the corrupt and violent present without forgetting ideas of redemption and sanctuary too.” Latest single ‘Beasts We Are’ displays Swain’s uncanny ability to convey such conflicting emotions within the same sound, the tender tones carrying both fondness and fury simultaneously. “‘Beasts We Are’ is about ghosts and the stories we tell ourselves,” she explains. “It’s about the planet, and the world, and our responsibility to the place we call home. It’s about ugly pasts and shared histories, and shared grief. It’s about where we find ourselves now as a species and an appeal to each other to care enough to do something about it.”

Babylon will be released on the 5th June and you can pre-order it now.

Lydia Luce – Baby Blues

“A track which originated in the depths of a period of suffering yet nevertheless asserted the potential of recovery, as though in some way instigating not only the rest of the record but also the path back to health Luce’s life would take.” So we wrote of ‘Belly’ from Lydia Luce‘s most recent full-length Mammoth back in 2025, summing up a record which charted a course through pain towards healing. Fast-forward a year and Luce is back with ‘Baby Blues’, a very different song, yet one still chronicling a difficult path through a life-changing period. “It’s about my experience postpartum,” Luce explains. “I also fully produced and recorded this at home which is something I’ve been wanting to do for so long. I wrote this during his naps and I posted a clip on Instagram and so many moms and parents found it and encouraged me to release it. I am so proud to share this one as it feels so raw to me in this stage of my life.”

‘Baby Blues’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Swapmeet – 2 C U

We’ve covered a couple of singles from Swapmeet‘s debut album Mount Zero in recent months, with ‘I Know‘ (“A sound able to encompass both sardonic slacker bite and cathartic alt rock release, rising from sly, taut beginnings into something with serious size and heft”) and ‘Sand‘ (“A more reflective and earnest track which mourns that which is lost within contemporary youth, where a thousand distractions rob some of the magic away from the experience”) highlighting different dimension of the Aussie band’s sound. With the record coming later this summer via Winspear, Swapmeet are now back with latest single ‘2 C U’, and this time they are at their most jubilant. The track opens almost hesitantly yet soon explodes into a bright and hazy rhythm in no time at all, playing like excitement bottled up and committed to sound.

Watch the video by Rhys Scarabosio below:

Mount Zero will be released via Winspear on the 17th July. Preorder it now from the Swapmeet Bandcamp.

Shaina Hayes – Timid

“Québec-based artist Shaina Hayes runs a vegetable farm in her hometown, a fact which is more than an interesting tidbit to add to a bio,” we wrote back in March when covering single ‘Flourish‘. “Because spend any time with Hayes’s music and you’ll come to appreciate a kinship between both of these pursuits: an attention to detail, a deep-rooted connection to the land and its life, not to mention an overarching patience that allows her to reflect upon the present with admirable clarity.” Hayes’s latest single ‘Timid’, out now via Bonsound, follows in this style, leaning into introversion and the ways in which we might nurture our own interior worlds. “I wanted to explore the idea that even at our most articulate, the way we express ourselves is just a tiny glimpse into what’s actually going on inside us,” she explains. “That we contain whole, unseen universes. Ultimately, Timid is a song about everything we feel but rarely manage to express.”

Trails and Ways – Next of Kin

“A reminder that life is richer in company, and that social isolation can be overcome, written and performed by a trio who worked through that very process themselves to bring the track to life.” So we wrote of ‘Patiently’, the triumphant return of Trails and Ways after going on a decade away. Eager to capitalise on the fresh momentum, the Oakland group have returned with brand new single ‘Next of Kin’. Somehow simultaneously expansive and intimate, the track is Trails and Ways doing what they are best at, evoking a tangible sense of emotion without losing any of the brightness and movement. Lyrically, it meditates on the strange moment of the present, where small personal hopes are impinged upon by an increasingly precarious global situation wracked by war, climate breakdown and extractive industry.

Vesuvian – Hecate in the Highlands

Back in February we introduced Vesuvian, the Philadelphia-based band consisting of Garret Bollin (guitar, vocals), Joey DeGrado (vocals, guitar), Bill Magerr (bass) and Gavin Caffrey Perez-Canto (drums and percussion), with single ‘Fortunate Death’. The first taste of their new self-titled album, the track was “certainly not your usual scrappy punk number,” we described, “drawing upon the work of Julio Cortázar and accounts of Mesoamerican history to create something cathartic and boisterous.” With the full-length coming soon via Worry Bead Records, Vesuvian have returned with new track ‘Hecate in the Highlands’. Opening with an impromptu choral opening that was initially meant as a joke, there’s a distinctively playful vibe to the song, embracing retro rock sensibilities alongside droll near-spoken vocals in a way which might at first seem almost ironic. But it soon becomes clear Vesuvian are committed to the sound with full sincerity, and as such the track becomes the perfect calling card for the entire release. “At times we thought we’d have to shelve the whole thing,” DeGrado says, “but it turned out as the song I’m most proud of.”

I hadn’t seen a soul in a hundred years
So I let him sit beside me and I let him bend my ear
But when his night came mine stayed bright
The way it always does every single lonely night

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With the release of Orion/Mother fast approaching, Alex Zhang Hungtai has returned with another single. ‘American Burial’ takes inspiration from Tobe Hooper’s 1982 classic Poltergeist, both in terms of the film’s narrative and the wider circumstances of its filming. “[The movie is] about a white family moving into a newly purchased home but the house was haunted because it was built on ‘Indian burial ground’,” Zhang explains. “Trivia: the skeleton corpses that float up from the muddy waters were real corpses cuz it was cheaper to buy unclaimed bodies than to build from scratch multiple skeletons. Hollywood logic! The actors did not know it was real. But perhaps all of us come to this land to bury something, consciously or not. Buildings burn, people die, and new buildings are built over it as if nothing ever happened.”

The image is a fitting one for a release concerned with the ways the past exists within the present, fragments perpetually returning no matter how deep they have been interred beneath the earth. But while other artists might get caught up with this excavation, or else put their energies into covering over the skeletons before they make themselves at home in our lives, Alex Zhang Hungtai aims to do something different. Welcome the past into the present, but not without purpose. Because that which has gone can be broken down and repurposed. From the scraps of the past, a new life might rise.

Photo by Nastya Bezrukova

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“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

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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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As lead single ‘Of Some Use’ attests, the result is every bit as compassionate and poignant as you might expect. The single embodies the tone of the album, presenting Bobby as a person thrust into a despairing situation yet still yearning to assert his own personality and worth. A challenge faced by many disabled people within a society so rigidly ableist, and one which persists despite (or sometimes even because of) the various attempts society makes to signal otherwise. “Writing books with their toes / Paint with brushes in their teeth / No arms still shoot arrows / Making pottery with their feet / Preening on TV shows / Racing wheelchairs down the street,” as one telling verse puts it. “All these heroes in the news / I just want to be of some use.”

Far more than an act of remembrance, Bobby’s Voice becomes a comment on the public attitude towards disabled people, as well as a highly personal attempt to right those wrongs in retrospect. To finally grant Bobby that which was denied him in life as one final gesture of love. “One of the key things that keeps me awake was how, with his disability, came invisibility: how a full grown, virile young man was deprived of his agency, his manhood, and most cruelly, his power of expression,” RP concludes. “So—maybe too little, too late—I decided to give Bobby his voice back.”

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