Lead single ‘Reward’ comes from 22° Halo, the recording project of Philadelphia-based songwriter and producer Will Kennedy. We’ve followed 22° Halo for a good while, most recently with album Lily of the Valley on Tiny Library Records. An album which “displayed the easy lo-fi nature that Kennedy projects so well,” as we wrote, “small and soft indie pop songs that handle real-life struggles with a shining sense of hope.” Continuing this style, ‘Reward’ makes for the ideal introduction to True Names. Something in its gentle compassion embodies the project’s spirit, Kennedy’s familiar willingness to broach difficulties with empathy and warmth aligning perfectly with the mission set out by Worry Bead Records.

Album art by Sami Martasian

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Lily of the Valley, the timely new album from 22° Halo, might centre on something intensely personal and difficult, but it’s more widely relevant too as it actively works to fight off despair and let light in on an otherwise dark time. As we described when writing of previous single ‘Virtual You’, the sound is “wistful, yes, and not immune from a certain sense of longing, but always with an overarching gratitude that such times happened at all.” With the album now out via Tiny Library Records, Will Kennedy has unveiled final single, ‘Cobwebs’. A fittingly introspective track which tracks the early days of the diagnosis which sits at the heart of the album, looking to preserve ordinary life while wrestling with an all-encompassing uncertainty.

I’m trying to believe that you’re good
I’m trying to believe that I’m good
I’m trying to believe that we’re good
I’m trying to believe

Clara Mann – Stadiums

UK singer-songwriter Clara Mann has announced her debut album, Rift, the follow up to 2021 EP Consolations (Sad Club Records). A culmination of her young career so far, label The state51 Conspiracy call the record “a tangible expression of Clara’s entire world—a snow globe raised in her palms for the world to see, in all its layers and complexities, containing all her love, relationships, memories, and experiences.” Mann describes her music as “almost-folk”, and the album’s two lead singles introduce this perfectly. Finely wrought and patient, minimal percussion lapping at the edges of the impressive vocals. ‘Stadiums’ is perhaps the standout, precise and emotive in equal measure, swaying around a still and poised centre.

Decant – Rest

Bay Area trio Decant are this month releasing two singles, both in preview of an upcoming EP set for release early next year and to celebrate the fact the tracks appear in the film credits for the movie Rust. The first single ‘Rest’ introduces the band’s evocative style, something folky that splits the difference between shadow and warmth. The result is at once poignant and moody, aching with a nocturnal longing yet holding on to a sense of light.

German Error Message – Lilt

Two decades since the project’s conception, the latest release from Paul Kintzing’s German Error Message is a self-titled collection of songs written and recorded since 2020. First released digitally earlier this year, the album is now getting a cassette release from Lily Tapes & Discs as part of their Fall ’24 batch. It’s both reassuringly familiar and somehow fresh, the warm and hushed lo-fi songs reaching out toward a newfound sense of brightness. As Lily Tapes put it: “Where previous albums may have built insular and hermetic worlds with their hushed delivery, German Error Message sprawls outwards, unfolding as a series of nested home-recording experiments disguised as folk songs.” Check out ‘Lilt’ as a taster.

Hamburger – Frankenstein

Bristol six-piece Hamburger are gearing up for the release of their new EP Beat Back the Ghouls via Specialist Subject Records later this month, and latest single ‘Frankenstein’ shows how the collection both builds upon their previous work and pushes the sound in new directions. Where debut EP Teenage Terrified offered equal parts rawness and invention, Hamburger use the new release to show off a more sophisticated, layered sound without sacrificing any of the personality that fans have come to love. ‘Frankenstein’ is the ideal introduction. A richly wistful track which pines for summers past with equal parts soaring energy and enveloping fuzz.

Lone Striker – Dunno

You might know Tom Brown as part of bands like Rural France and Teenage Tom Petties, but new project Lone Striker moves away from the fuzzy jangle of those projects towards something more akin to Americana, albeit one with an off-kilter wobble. With a self-titled album coming next year Repeating Cloud, Safe Suburban Home and Hidden Bay Records, Brown has shared the title track to introduce the project. Something of a theme song for Lone Striker which doubles as an ode to those old school number nines.

Mumble Tide – The Rails

Consisting of singer Gina Leonard and composer Ryan Rogers, Mumble Tide is a Bristol-based project which has made a name with a maximalist amalgamation of synth pop and country. But new single ‘The Rails’, out now on Breakfast Records, sees the outfit pivot towards a different direction. With help from producer Stew Jackson (Massive Attack), Mumble Tide worked with newfound patience, crafting a slow and careful arrangement in which Leonard’s vocals can be heard in all their nuance and depth. The result draws heavily on sixties folk but elevates such sensibilities with an almost cinematic sheen, and the emotive, assured mood which results is central to the track’s themes. “’The Rails’ is like an angry kiss, or throwing stones at a mirror,” Leonard explains. “It’s about leaning into all the things that hold me back and in the process realising that they’re not as solid as they seem.”

Otala – Patchwork

With a sound that combines jazz, math and post-rock with ambient and spoken word, Nottingham’s Otala are not ones to be held to genre conventions. Having recently signed to London’s Lil Chop Record Shop, the band are preparing to release new EP Fire! To The River next February, and single ‘Patchwork’ gives listeners a chance to immerse themselves within the evocative and inventive Otala sound. A song that has been part of the outfit’s repertoire for a long while now reimagined as something fitting their current level. “’Patchwork’ is a song we have been performing since we began playing as Otala, but one that we’d originally planned to let fade into our history,” the band explain. “After seeing a live video from an old set we decided to put the time in to adapt and reanimate it into something we’re proud to release.”

Watch the video by Rory Allen below:

‘Patchwork’ is out now via Lil Chop Record Shop and available from Bandcamp. Fire! To The River will be released in February.

Ruby Gill – Some Kind Of Control

We’ve previously described the work of  South Africa-born, Melbourne/Naarm-based pianist, guitarist and singer-songwriter Ruby Gill as “setting its sights on the overbearing, patronising force of male entitlement,” and “aris[ing] from a very personal situation but end[ing] up speaking to a far wider experience.” New single ‘Some Kind of Control’ follows in the same vein to explore the strange blend of agency and restriction experienced during the lockdown period of the pandemic. “I had been grappling with what it meant to have all and no control over my time and body—all at once,” Gill explains:

In a big way, the world was in charge, but also in a day-to-day way, I had all the power: I could move freely through my kitchen and clothes and kindness however I wished—it was a new experience for me after feeling quite trapped in some difficult spaces and systems for a long time—“always babysitting other people’s arguments instead of my own” as the lyrics say. I feel like this song encompasses so much of what I’ve learnt and reclaimed in the past few years, and feels very reflective musically of my true, silly, powerful self and community.

Watch the video filmed, directed and edited by Bridgette Winten, with shoot and lighting assistance by Sophie Christopher below:

‘Some Kind of Control’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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Now 22° Halo have released one final single before the record comes out at the beginning of November. Titled ‘Orioles at Dusk’, it is another slice of wistful but quietly joyous indie pop. The Orioles of the title is this time not an ornithological reference, but a baseball one. “[The track is] about falling in love with Kate for the first time,” Kennedy explains, “and canvassing outside Baltimore Orioles games over the summer.” The atmosphere captures these feeling perfectly, combining the heart-fluttering buoyancy of new love in the peppy percussion and sparkly guitar and the sweet-sad sunset feeling of twinkling city lights beyond a summer evening ballgame.

Oh man the game won’t be over ’til ten
Baltimore orioles at dusk and I’m in love

Lily of the Valley will be released via Tiny Library Records on 8th November. Pre-order it now from the 22º Halo Bandcamp page.

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“At some very basic and intuitive level, [Will] Kennedy taps into the stuff that’s really important. Getting lost in the present, side by side with those you love.” That’s how we described ‘Bird Sanctuary’, the first single from 22° Halo‘s new album Lily of the Valley, coming this November on Tiny Library Records. The single introduced the style with experience of the natural world, but new track ‘Virtual You’ shows such feelings are not unique to the great outdoors. As the title suggests, the song delves into cyberspace and the abundant nostalgia it offers. But rather than finding melancholy in those old photographs of cherished moments now past, the song is delivered with something brighter. Wistful, yes, and not immune from a certain sense of longing, but always with an overarching gratitude that such times happened at all.

Chris Acker – Shit Surprise

“The most beautiful and poetic song about stepping in dog shit that has ever been written.” That’s how label Gar Hole Records describe Chris Acker’s ‘Shit Surprise’. The first track from upcoming album Famous Lunch, the song is an ode to the cosmic justice which so often comes attached to vanity. How those walking a little too tall will inevitably get slapped down again. Behind Acker’s trademark absurdity is the essential troubadour tale, where the confused dreamer collides with the banalities of life and comes to feel cursed for his failings. And, most importantly, the tongue-in-cheek style sacrifices none of the track’s emotional weight, positioning Acker alongside the likes of Dean Johnson as one of the most authentic and interesting practitioners of contemporary folk.

Watch the video directed and edited by Cooper Kenward with animation by Anubha Gupta below:

Famous Lunch is out on the 11th October via Gar Hole Records and you can pre-order it now.

Liv Greene – Katie

Described as “a reckoning with reality, a vulnerable snapshot of hard-won self-acceptance,” Deep Feeler is the forthcoming full-length from Nashville songwriter Liv Greene on Free Dirt Records. The product of a decision to finally embrace a truer self within her work, the album sees Greene cease attempts to bury personal truths, reframing songwriting from an escape mechanism to a kind of spotlight. Belonging to a rich lineage of songwriters going back through Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch and others, the album emerges defiant in its unguardedness, finding healing within the act of revealing one’s core. New single ‘Katie’ is a great example of the style. A lesson in how learning to be oneself can lead to objective good. “This came out of a relationship that wasn’t my first queer love experience,” as Greene explains, “but it was my first time allowing it to not be a bad thing. It comes from a place of tenderness—of allowing yourself to feel those romantic feelings and really revel in them.”

Deep Feeler is out on the 18th October via Free Dirt Records and you can pre-order it now.

Lutalo – Oh Well

Last month we featured two new singles from Lutalo‘s upcoming album The Academy, coming soon via Winspear. A hint at the spectrum of moods present on the record, with ‘The Bed’ offering a bright folk sound and ‘Broken Twin’ something altogether darker. Latest track ‘Oh Well’ splits the difference between the two, marbling heavy reverb with an almost transcendent falsetto to evoke Lutalo’s teenage years in Minnesota, a time set against the backdrop of his mother’s mental health challenges. What results is a spectrum of emotions packed tightly together, where confusion and desperation sit alongside fondness, and a crushing weight is always threatening to overtake everything.

Molina – Organs

This October Danish–Chilean composer Molina will release debut full-length When you wake up via Escho, an album which looks to in some way transcend the rush of contemporary living via a committed awareness of life’s small details. Thus emerges a layered brand of dream pop which eschews the nostalgia so common for the genre in favour of a close attention to the present. Latest single ‘Organs’ sees ML Buch lend their talents to push this sound further. A song “very much a fusion of our individual approaches to perceiving melodies, recordings and sound in general,” as Molina explains. “We are both fascinated by the ‘pulse’ in music and how a song can be perceived to move at different paces. We also share a mutual attraction to catchy melodies. ML tends to unfold words with the melody in an elastic manner, while I prefer more on-the-note vocals that introduce unexpected harmonic shifts. ‘Organs’ kind of holds all those elements of fascination and exploration together.”

Sam Weber – Tamarindo Sunsets

In recent months we’ve previewed the Clear + Plain, the new album from Vancouver Island-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Weber, first with the evocative ‘Oregon‘ and later the warm and relaxed ‘Void‘. “But while the languid tone might suggest a track of romance and intimacy,” we wrote of the latter, “the lyrics paint a more ambiguous picture, where mortality flashes into view with an unnerving abruptness.” With the album out now via Sonic Unyon Records, Weber is back with new single, ‘Tamarindo Sunsets’. A song about “staring into the digital abyss and being confronted with greener and greener grass,” as he explains. “Reckoning with what it means to find that beauty, peace, satisfaction in your heart.”

Clear + Plain is out now via Sonic Unyon.

Soot Sprite x Muttering – Burn The Leaves

Hot on the heels of recent single I Went Swimming / Home Among Your Bones, which we described as “a refusal to romanticise difficult relationships, a determination to learn lessons and live more healthily,” Soot Sprite are back with For Joy, a new collaborative EP with London‘s Muttering. Again released via Specialist Subject Records, the three-song release sees Elise Cook and Chaz Bush share songwriting duties, with Bush taking the reins for first single ‘Burn The Leaves’. A weighty and cathartic examination of the past inspired by J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country, drawing on the novel’s bittersweet retrospection on a time which could not last. “We all have certain anchor points that you look back on,” Bush explains. “Memories that hold significance and in difficult times often hope to rekindle. The thought of what could have been.”

This Lonesome Paradise – These Western Roads

With forthcoming album Luna Nocturna, California psych-folk outfit This Lonesome Paradise conjure a world worthy of their name, drawing the listener into a sonic environment as stark and striking as the American West of Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre. Lead single ‘These Western Roads’ offers a path into this landscape. A dark and brooding slice of country noir which simmers with equal parts beauty and foreboding. But more than a lesson in cinematic worldbuilding, the album serves as a meditation on the American Dream with all its brutality, broken promises and betrayals. A project doomed from its very inception, destined to always be haunted by the means in which reached for its goals.

Luna Nocturna is out on the 18th October via Bad Vibes Good Friends and you can pre-order it now.

Why Bonnie – Three Big Moons

“Foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it.” That’s how we described Wish On The Bone, the new full-length from Why Bonnie coming later this week on Fire Talk Records, in a preview back in June. A style fitting for the new philosophy of lead Blair Howerton, who is looking to escape preconception and expectation to embrace the freedom of constant change. Take latest single ‘Three Big Moons’, where the old Why Bonnie country twang is repurposed to tell an old story in a different way. Themes of loneliness and isolation are keystones of the genre, but here the dusty roads and full moon heartbreak are swapped out for something altogether more extraterrestrial.

I was a heavy weight
Out there in space
Took one for the team
And took a swan dive into nothing
They pinned a note to my collar
It said “we couldn’t save her”
And dropped down the american flag
Like it was a favor
Walked around a few earth hours
Until my feet got sore
Found a nice big crater
24 by 24

Wish On The Bone will be released via Fire Talk Records on 30th August and is available to pre-order via Bandcamp.

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Following a series of collaborations with Joel Johnston of Far Caspian, 22° Halo are now releasing a new single with Johnston’s label Tiny Library Records. Titled ‘Bird Sanctuary’, it finds Kennedy doing what he does best, a gentle duet with wife Kate Schneider that sparkles like a gem. He describes the song as one “about listening and not listening,” taking material he wrote around the theme of his wife’s experiences with severe illness. This is referred to only elliptically, with short, sentence-long “verses” that Kennedy delivers in between Schneider singing the chorus. “The thing you try and tell me breaks up with the wind,” he sings at the very beginning. “Say it again.”

But ultimately the heavy stuff is not the lasting feeling. Or at least it doesn’t drag you down in the way you might expect. It’s leavened into something uplifting with that trademark 22° Halo sense of almost naive wonder at the simple things all around us. “Saw the sparrows in alley picking twigs up,” Schneider sings during the chorus. “Are you listening?” It’s as if, at some very basic and intuitive level, Kennedy taps into the stuff that’s really important. Getting lost in the present, side by side with those you love.

‘Bird Sanctuary’ is out now via Tiny Library Records.

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We’ve decided to expand things slightly this year, giving ourselves a chance to write a little something about the albums we wanted to cover but never got the opportunity. Albums which meant something to us at various points through 2021. Some cemented themselves early as our favourites of the year, others were relatively late additions that held our attention as the calendars changed, and a few break the rules in being albums released in previous years but earn their inclusion here having proved constant companions through last twelve months.

So here are some records we really enjoyed in 2021. We hope you enjoy them too.

22° Halo – Garden Bed

Lost Sound Tapes

Led by Will Kennedy (Sleeper Records) and supported by the likes of Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps) and Francis Lyon (Ylayali, Free Cake For Every Creature), 22° Halo are something of a Philadelphia DIY lo-fi pop supergroup. Their third release, Garden Bed is as sweet and soft as the peachy pink cover art, taking the gloomy fog of slowcore and holding a light beneath it, the cloud suddenly enveloping and bright. Paired with the earnest tenderness of Kennedy’s vocals, the songs come to feel like old companions. Fond and quietly contemplative, strangely familiar and hopeful in a manner not quite explicable. Songs easy to be around and easier to return to, comforting in the very fact they exist.

Advance Base – Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write

Orindal Records

In ‘Kitty Winn’, a song on Advance Base’s 2015 record Nephew in the Wild, Owen Ashworth described watching The Exorcist and recognising the actor from Panic at Needle Park. “It felt like seeing an old friend,” he sings, “The way I wondered where she’d been.” Ashworth has introduced us to a lot of characters of his own over the years, but Wall of Tears & Other Songs I Didn’t Write performs a different kind of introduction. Inspired by the conspicuous absence of karaoke during recent times, the release takes tracks from acts both old and new and reimagines them in the image of Ashworth’s distinctively hushed and empathetic style. With a mixture of classics (Lucinda Williams, Iris DeMent, St. John Prine) and contemporaries/Orindal Records label mates (Dan Wriggins, Gia Margaret, Wednesday). The collection will resonate differently depending on who’s listening, but chances are there’ll be at least one occasion where the introduction is more like a reintroduction. An old friend smiling through the years, suddenly before you once again. 

Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Ba Da Bing Records

“I’m a three-legged dog, working with what I’ve got,” sings Cassandra Jenkins on ‘Michaelangelo’, the opening track from An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. “And part of me,” she continues, “will always be looking for what I’ve lost.” It’s one of the few tracks that directs its focus on Jenkins herself rather than reflections from those around her. The record is inspired by the work of Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukherjee, an artist who explored the line between allegory and abstraction with an intuitive fluidity, and Jenkins follows this lead to spin her surroundings into representations of her own. Be that the characters and objects encountered in the travel diary of ‘Hard Drive’, the accumulated wisdom of ‘New Bikini’, or the startlingly pretty instrumentation that builds across the record thanks to a whole host of musicians. Songs shaped by Jenkins’s careful but fleeting hand, like sculptures allowed to dissipate as soon as they have formed. Moments captured, meaning what they will.

Cla-ras – Five clusters

Lily Tapes & Discs

The first full length by multidisciplinary artist Jeremy Ferris, Five clusters takes inspiration from nature’s long game. With subtle intricacies growing from every crevice, its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. The sense of some circular pattern, the past returning as the future, post-humanity imagined as prehistoric verdancy. The sensation is both delicate and strangely visceral. Keyed into the botanical surface and the supporting undergrowth, where fine mycelium threads facilitate pungent decomposition, enriching the soil so that the songs might bloom with their damp, bodily life.     

Damien Jurado – The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania

Maraqopa Records

The world of The Monster Who Hated Pennsylvania is familiar in the way a dream is familiar. Or is that foreign in the way dreams are foreign? Damien Jurado presents each track as a space between the known and unknown, their characters hanging on in the hope such positions are transitory, and in doing so blurs the line between the characters and the songwriter himself. Take Majestic centrepiece ‘Johnny Caravella’, which calls to mind ‘Percy Faith’ from The Horizon Just Laughed but this time takes inspiration from fictional DJ Dr. Johnny Fever from WKRP in Cincinnati. But ‘taking inspiration’ doesn’t quite capture the song’s true extent, as Jurado channels the fictional doctor, his delivery neither quite Fever or himself but a blend of the two. “Who’ll wear the crown when the change is approaching / Of some other season renown?” this hybrid figure asks as the track winds tighter with every line. This latent intensity is brought to the surface in the finale, an urgent beseeching that we hang on a little longer. “As I exited north the radio spoke / ‘All is not lost even if you’re without a direction’,” goes the final verse. “Go west, go west, 1972 / The sun hasn’t set, the stars very few / Just stick around ’til the light pushes into the darkness.”

The Felice Brothers – From Dreams to Dust

Yep Roc Records

‘Jazz on the Autobahn’, the opening track of what is The Felice Brothers’ eighth and perhaps most compelling record, finds two people fleeing their old lives. It’s never revealed exactly what Helen and The Sheriff are leaving in the rear-view mirror of their “doomed Corvette,” but what waits for them at the end of the road is imagined in vivid detail. Helen dreams of the apocalypse arriving as an anthropomorphic tornado, as poisoned lakes and acid rain, a force as “loud as a mushroom cloud” yet “ghostly like a glockenspiel.” The Sheriff disagrees, tries to “make a distinction between death and extinction” as Helen spits melon seeds and drinks 7-Up in his car. His is an apocalypse stripped of its fictions and graces. No saving angels, no hand of God, no spared billionaires on Mars. The track is the standard bearer of From Dreams to Dust. A record of cutting fury and crushing sadness set to rich and affirming rhythms. Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase. A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive. “What is freedom?” The Sheriff wonders in his closing verse. To be empty of desire? To find everything we’ve lost or have been in search of? Does it feel like jazz on the autobahn?

Giles Corey – S/T

The Flenser

The side project of Have a Nice Life’s Dan Barrett, Giles Corey picked up the threads of Deathconsciousness and followed them deep underground. The self-titled record, originally released in 2011 but given a new lease of life by The Flenser for its tenth anniversary, feels like a haunting committed to tape. At once intense and eerily hushed, spacious yet claustrophobic, lonely but never alone. A picture of depression as an intensely personal experience which nevertheless transcends the individual. A torment too large for a single skin. When ‘Empty Churches’ opens with paranormal investigator Raymond Cass talking of voices of unknown origin appearing on radio frequencies, the mood is not so much disturbing as alluring. A dimension beyond all this. Something to lose yourself in. To submit to. To hope for beyond all we know and can know, in spite of it all.

Grouper – Shade

Kranky

Described as a record about “respite and the coast, poetically and literally,” Shade is every bit as considered and in-depth as you might expect from an album fifteen years in the making. The mutual relationship between person and place is conjured with Harris’s cloudy abstraction, the line between strange and familiar blurred beyond its binary simplicity, and so too the border between intimacy and solitude. An overarching sense of a distance drapes over the record, evoking isolation in space or time, and the hushed tone carries with it hidden depths which speak to the unknowable nature of the sea. The result is simultaneously elemental and fundamentally human, and one of Grouper’s finest records to date.

The Hold Steady – Open Door Policy

Positive Jams

The Hold Steady universe has always been something of a gauntlet for its characters. A high-speed race with a whole lot of entrants but not so many finishers. To say Open Door Policy picks up with these winners is to assume the race has finished, when in fact it has merely changed. The participants are older, their communities atomised, their world having been sliced up and commodified by tech-savvy barons both ruthless and polite. In this way, the band’s eighth album feels a closer descendant of Craig Finn’s solo records than more recent Hold Steady records. A considered, cohesive album of narrative-driven songs which offer glimpses into the lives of imperfect figures dissatisfied or downtrodden and merely surviving. Finn & Co. mean many different things to many different people, but too often their work is (mis)understood as a mere good time. As though the joy of The Hold Steady is solely the joy of the party. But like so many of their records before it, Open Door Policy is proof of something deeper and more profound. The quiet, ugly dignity of humans persevering, and the irreplaceable value of a community to see them through.

KUZU – The Glass Delusion

Astral Spirits

Glass delusion is a manifestation of a psychiatric phenomenon witnessed primarily across the wealthy classes of Early Modern Europe where the individual feared they were made of glass. King Charles VI of France allegedly forbade anyone from touching him, so acute was his fear of shattering, and took to wearing protective clothing. It was a fear intensely human yet inorganic, recasting life as a path with danger around every bend. Chicago‘s KUZU throw us into such a heightened state, their improvisational jazz guarding its hand, leaving the listener no choice but to strap in and follow the slow-burning yet ever shifting lines. But from within the anxiety of this undetermined ride, an overarching conviction emerges. The sense everything is barrelling toward some spectacular finale. The dreadful shattering event. The screw turns and turns, the sound needling with increasingly deranged energy, leaving the listener like Gene Hackman’s Harry Caul at the end of The Conversation, tearing their surroundings rather than break apart themselves.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Theory of Ice

You’ve Changed Records

Michi Saagig Nishnaabeg artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has made her name in poetry, fiction, music and scholarship, and Theory of Ice feels like a culmination of this body of work. A lesson in world building, in communication, in history and preservation and life. A weapon against settler colonisation that carries no dull weight or serrated edge, indeed no violence at all. “The settler colonial state is not hated, it is pitied,” describes Steven Lambke in the liner notes, “for its smallness, its evil, its perpetual cruelty.” Theory of Ice turns this force against itself, utilising an absence of violence to illuminate the absence within violence. The dark, meaningless lacuna at the heart of the imperialist project, a space never filled despite the visceral physicality of its rule. Moreover, Simpson evokes the persistent presence of the peoples who have suffered at its hand, kept alive in acts of community and gesture, in the work of a searching artist’s life. “In realization / we don’t exist without each other,” go the record’s closing lines. “She says: there’s nothing about you / I’m not willing to know.”

Macie Stewart – Mouth Full of Glass

Orindal Records

To describe the career of Macie Stewart is to describe a career of collaboration. The multi-instrumentalist founded bands such as Kids These Days, Marrow and OHMME, played as part of Ken Vandermark’s Marker ensemble, improvisational act The Few and with Lia Kohl as a violin/cello duo, as well as lending her talents to records by a plethora of acts including V.V. Lightbody, Whitney, Adeline Hotel and S.Z.A. But within these collaborations, Stewart became aware her own individual sound was being left to atrophy. Indeed, she had no idea what her individual sound might be. With its unflinching eye and succulent arrangements, Mouth Full of Glass represents an attempt to find out. An artist surveying their own inner workings through considered and open-ended exploration, leaning into solitude as a medium of discovery and learning from all that has occurred before without ever becoming beholden to the past. “What pleasure I choose to keep after I buried it deep,” as Stewart sings across the sinuous sax of ‘Garter Snake’. “Try to uncover it all.”

Michael Beach – Dream Violence

Goner Records & Poison City Records

On Dream Violence, Naarm/Melbourne-based Michael Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique. Imagine Neil Young meeting The Velvet Underground on a dark and hopeless night in our late-capitalist hellscape to muse on the meaninglessness of existence. Ripping rockers rub shoulders with heartfelt piano ballads and genuine, capital-E earworms, all in an attempt to communicate what Beach describes as “human futility, passion, desire, anger, frustration, and the struggle to maintain hope in a somewhat hopeless time.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Solely

Dear Life Records

Following on from 2020’s stunning Azaela, Natalie Jane Hill’s second record sees a reversal of perspective. Because while the first album looked to the expansive roll of the land for its focus, Solely turns inward to examine an environment far more personal. Themes of loss and loneliness emerge from this introspection, by-products of any quest for self-discovery, though Hill’s intricate arrangements are too deft and nuanced to be consumed by such emotions. What instead emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.

Protomartyr – Ultimate Success Today

Domino

Across five albums, Protomartyr’s Joe Casey has cemented his status as a cynic in both the ancient and modern sense. A fatalistic Irish Catholic from working class Detroit writing songs that weave dense webs of references to ancient philosophy and arcane literature. The everyday man alienated, an outsider enraged at what is unfolding around him. Written during a spell of illness, Ultimate Success Today sees Casey confront not only his own mortality but the wider prospect of hope in the contemporary neoliberal society. His father, whose untimely death has haunted each Protomartyr album to varying degrees, died during a routine medical procedure, and Casey’s pain is matched by a dread of the doctor’s office. A cynicism of medicine rooted not in partisan politics or misinformation but existential terror—the sense even the surgeons won’t be able to save him. The explicit goodbye of closing track ‘Worm in Heaven’ might play as a cathartic acknowledgement of this fear, but Casey chooses to undercut himself, mocking his own attempts to conquer dread through music. A cynicism wrapped around itself to include a doubt in the utility or power of art. “Dumb aphorist embrace obscurants,” he sings of himself on ‘The Aphorist’, “and write in ogham for your final lines.” A cynic, old and new, to the very end.

R.A.P. Ferreira – The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures

Self-released

Whether recording as milo, scallops hotel or most recently R.A.P. Ferreira, Nashville-based Rory Ferreira has been releasing some of the most inventive and interesting rap music of the past few years. The Light Emitting Diamond Cutter Scriptures is his most cohesive record to date, the full maturity of his lyricism on show without losing any of the DIY aesthetic that has long lended his work its authenticity. Because Ferreira is a rapper in the purest sense. A radical, a philosopher, a comedian. Interested in nothing but the words. “What’s morbid is there’s poets who want to be on the Forbes List,” he sings on ‘uptown 37’, “I will be gorgeous and homeless.” And gorgeous this is, the lyrics skating over a whole gamut of moods and subjects, reaching for whatever cultural reference he can get his hands on, however high or low. Where else are you going to find Ansel Adams, Inspector Clouseau, Euripedes and Mr Bean all living on the same record?

Renée Reed – S/T

Keeled Scales

Born into a family of musicians and folklorists, Renée Reed grew up amid the best of Cajun and Creole music. Her work contains a hundred shades and small details pointing toward this history, but its lasting influence is less tangible. A sense of intuition threads through the songs. A phenomenon which lends them a certain timelessness, the sense they haven’t been so much written as teased out of some half-remembered space. The intricate arrangements are rendered simple in their instinctive rhythm, Reed’s poetic lyrics given the weight of the land. “We’d stand in the dark and cry,” she sings near the end of the record, “Oh, if only we could / For our bones, they belong to the country.” These songs feel like they belong to the country too, Reed more a guardian than a creator. For now they are travelling with her, and a worthy custodian she makes. 

Space Afrika – Honest Labour

Dais Records

The UK has always been a kind of dreamstate. A society held up on imagined pasts and false notions, a deluded fantasy stretched to breaking point yet never relinquishing its hold. This dark dread is in the dense Twin Peakian synths of Honest Labour’s opening moments, but Manchester‘s Space Afrika are here to do more than recapitulate the moribund British dream. For within the dreamstate live the dreamers, and each dreamer—however isolated and despondent—has their own dreams. Feeling more like a documentary than album, the record details the visions of this nameless population. A tessellated blend of samples, field recordings and vocal cameos which emerge haphazardly from dark layers of instrumentation. The result is an expressionistic picture of a society, one dazed and delirious, left to wander this long night with all their love and fear and loss in the hope some dawn might lend this intangible reality some weight.  

Sun June – Somewhere

Run For Cover Records / Keeled Scales

Take a look at the artwork of Sun June’s Somewhere and you might see a pillar of smoke gradually fade into a pastel sky. The image is fitting for a sound they developed on 2018’s Years, a record of gently swaying country pop songs which traced feelings of loss and grief as they dispersed into the wider context of a life. Sadness drifting away from its source, becoming more translucent with distance but always present in some diffuse concentration. Though clearly building on the previous record, Somewhere sees a certain inversion. Love stirs from within the tracks and with it a poppier, full-bodied sound. The sense the quiet melancholy is coalescing into something more tangible and immediate, gathering weight and sinking toward some intensity on the ground. Perhaps we got it backward, we’re looking at the artwork upside down.

Tasha – Tell Me What You Miss The Most

Father/Daughter Records

In a year of weighty foreboding and needling menace, Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss The Most came to represent a safe haven. An introspective album which excavates personal ground not as some exercise in regret or sadness but to carve a space in which to rest and ponder. Be it musing on the pasts that were and the presents that never came to be, or the unknown futures still up in the air. Imagery of beds and sleep recurs across the record, and the songs come to knit their own mattress and sheets. A place where time passes in reassuring cycles and the pressing outside is held at bay, one’s troubles suddenly small and tactile enough to be examined in the palm of a hand. 

Tobacco City – Tobacco City, USA

Scissor Tail Records

Listening to Chicago’s Tobacco City is to be transported to the imagined locale of its title, a loving patchwork of country music settings; like searching for radio waves from a porchside rocking chair or feeding quarters into a jukebox in the musty refuge of a dark barroom. Lonesome ballads wind slow with regret and pedal steel, folk songs get cosmic on sunburn and psychedelics, and honky-tonk shuffles flow easy as that three-beers-in second wind after a long day on the production line. Hard-earned wisdom sits side by side with wry humour, capturing the tragedy, hope and absurdity of broken people going about their lives the best they can. Riding out heartbreak on the buzz of cheap booze and bright lights. As Lexi Goddard sings at one point, “Being alone ain’t so bad when you’re half in the bag.”

The Weather Station – Ignorance

Fat Possum Records

“I never believed in the robber,” sings The Weather Station‘s Tamara Lindeman on Ignorance’s opening track. “I never saw nobody climb over my fence.” The lines contain a multitude of meanings. Stress a different word and you get a different shade of the album’s eponymous state. The robber doesn’t exist. At least to my knowledge. At least not around these parts. But the truth lies in the volatile swirl of instrumentation, a jazzy swell of cymbals and piano and drums, sax licking staccato like the devil’s tongue or the threatening word of God. ‘Robber’ is a confession, a plea, a waking fever dream. The colonial past and capitalist present manifest in all its unease. A violence which seeps out, haunting even the record’s most tender moments. Lindeman repeatedly turns to the natural world as an escape, from the birds of ‘Parking Lot’ to the “cold metallic scent of snow” in ‘Subdivisions’, the sky, the green, the soft of ‘Heart’. But as it says in ‘Loss’, “At some point you’d have to live as if the truth was true.” Nature might still persist, but it is the robber who built the world around us. His hand is still in our pockets. Even the sunset on ‘Atlantic’ is blood red.

Wednesday – Twin Plagues

Orindal Records

Though Twin Plagues is a record of memories, there’s nothing polished about the experiences being relayed, no rose-tinted gloss applied through repeated telling. There’s no nostalgia either. No intention to preserve or wish to return. Rather, Wednesday portray the past as something still present. The rugged surface across which the present is overlain. Its contours reveal itself on even the most ordinary days, be it in the gut-drop of a missed step, a suddenly interrupted view. Memories held for no good reason, not exclusively bad but always haunting. Memories as they return to you in dreams. The kid with a fucked up buzzcut. The burned down Dairy Queen. Birds in the air, flies in the bug light, brawls at the baseball and crossbows in old family photographs. Sometimes these memories are traumatic, sometimes they are sad, sometimes they mean nothing beyond their own shape and texture but then again, that’s just how life unfolds.        

Wendy Eisenberg – Bent Ring

Dear Life Records

Even in the crowded field of the internet age, Wendy Eisenberg stands apart in their prolific invention. Since the beginning of 2020, they have released at least five solo records (as well as working as part of Editrix), each offering intricate and thematically precise sounds which serve as frameworks through which to examine a particular space or time. The latest, Bent Ring, began as a self-imposed challenge to make an album with no guitar, but really stands apart in the direction of its gaze. A record looking back across a period of great productivity and achievement nevertheless attenuated by the hostile conditions of the surrounding environment. A contemplation of what it means to be an artist in our world, and how the endurance, commitment, frustration and joy of the vocation come to shape the artist too. With the earthy, temperamental twang of its salvaged banjo, Bent Ring encapsulates both the exhaustion and energy of an artist’s life, its steadfast rhythm always threatening to slow or speed up but ultimately pressing on regardless.     

Wes Tirey – The Midwest Book of the Dead

Dear Life Records

“Silos stand like chapels / Chapels stand like graves / Graves stand like corn / Corn stands like waves.” So opens ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’, a song which encapsulates the spirit of Wes Tirey’s tenth album. One populated with blue heron and crawdads and creek beds, a land of fields and factories stalked by stray dogs and innumerable ghosts. But more than a survey of this very American landscape, Tirey offers us characters too. People presented in snatches, sometimes nothing more than the distinctive ring of their voice. What emerges is not a clear narrative, at least not in the linear sense, but rather a patchwork of vignettes which combine into a picture far larger and more extensive. The dead are plural in this book, and each has their own story to tell.

Will Stratton – The Changing Wilderness

Bella Union

A fundamentally exploratory songwriter, Will Stratton has never been one to settle in a single groove. But if one feature has stretched through his work, it’s the art of introspection. But then came the late 2010s and the intensification of our rightward spiral down. Faced with such pressing political issues, Stratton went into The Changing Wilderness with a new desire to engage with the wider world. To write a record which might catalogue the atrocities of this moment. As he sings on ‘When I’ve Been Born (I’ll Love You)’: “The present is prosaic / The future, a disgrace / We can’t just look away now / It stares us in the face.” Capturing the tone of the record, the song charts the profound sickness of our times, and can’t help but slip back toward self-examination in the face of such horror. A search which emerges with no solution beyond a determination to face the worst undaunted. “When I get my prize, I’ll love you,” goes the chorus. “As the oceans rise, I’ll love you / When the air gеts thin, I’ll love you / If the fascists win, I’ll love you.”

If you enjoyed anything on this list, you may also be interested in list of songs we missed in 2021, which will be published shortly. And of course, there were lots of amazing records that we did write about in the last year, so have a look back through our Reviews and Previews sections to find more.

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