Much has occurred since we first featured Adeem The Artist back in 2016, the Knoxville-based songwriter going on to earn national recognition with their convention-challenging style of folk and country, a style embodied by acclaimed records like Cast-Iron Pansexual and White Trash Revelry. Ideas of spirituality and faith have always been central to the project, not to mention the intrinsic doubt and suffering which comes attached to any serious contemplation of such concepts, so it is fitting that Adeem The Artist’s next record Christians for Goliath is a bona fide Christian album which challenges the tendency of the genre to champion decidedly un-Christian values. “There is this massive wave of evangelical Christianity in America that is largely rejecting the basic tenets of what Christian values are supposed to be,” as Adeem says. “When it’s being done in the name of a God who calls for equity, justice, and radical hospitality, that is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The confronting and urgent project was made in Nashville with none other than John Darnielle, and Rich Mullins-inspired lead single ‘Hard To Get’ is a direct collaboration with The Mountain Goats, so you know the mission has the right people on board. Watch the lyric video below:

Christians for Goliath will be released on the 11th December via Four Quarters Records / Thirty Tigers and you can pre-order it now.

Alex Gardner & the Golden Apples – Robin Hood

Writing back in 2023 of album Highly Attainable Dreams, we described the work of LA-based songwriter Alex Gardner as “a kind of outsider folk for the twenty-first century,” drawing on everything from Michael Hurley to classic American literature. Next month sees the release of The Temptation of Thieves a new album by Alex Gardner & the Golden Apples, and this time he casts an even wider net for inspiration. As the title of the record and single ‘Robin Hood’ suggest, the story of everyone’s favourite outlaw is central to the record, though English and German romanticism, ancient Greece, modernist poetry, fairy tales and folkloric traditions all hold an influence, as well as the conventions and myths of classic folk and blues. Such albums were really made to be experienced in full, but ‘Robin Hood’ is available now, providing both a taste of Gardner’s idiosyncratic style and a glimpse into the mind of a heroic scoundrel.

The Temptation of Thieves will be released on the 7th November

Annelise Eppen x An Triangles – Promise

It took a three-month silent meditation retreat for Annelise Eppen to decide her songs were worth collecting into an album, the Massachusetts songwriter using the contemplative space to fully envision the hushed reckoning that is her debut full-length Heaven is Available. Having worked to record the released with Doug Poppe (An Triangles), the album will be released in 2027, though Eppen has shared lead single ‘Promise’ as a taster. Delivered with a spare, lo-fi folk aesthetic, Eppen and Poole channel the meditative spirit of the album’s origins to offer a genuinely spiritual style of music, where humble quiet is matched by a burning desire or indeed desperation to commit to God. The result is as much a vow as a song. A commitment to living more truthfully, more receptively, more inconspicuously, made in the silent relationship we share with our creator. “This is the time to make a promise / But make it in the dark and keep it quiet / This is the time to tend the fire / To listen to the songs and get inspired,” as Eppen sings in the opening verse. “But now’s the time that I will listen / I got a little taste of what I’m missing.”

Hockitay – redstar

“A casual listen… suggests this struggle might have come good, the sound full of apparent heart and fondness,” we wrote of Hockitay‘s ‘half smile‘ back in August. “Though dig a little deeper and it seems the dismay might have just found a new focus. Because, as the above line shows, there’s an existential confusion to at play, the intimacy not so much straight romance as a kind of confession.” Now Montreal artist has shared EP redstar in its entirety and the result is every bit as deep and conflicted, moving between themes as disparate as AI, cosmology and personal identity in order to explore the experience of being alive in a contemporary age full of artifice. Released as a final single, the title track encompasses all of these ideas within one genre-bending song, and serves as the ideal entry point for those about to dive in.

Watch the video directed by Renaud Jacob below:

redstar is out now and available from the Hockitay Bandcamp page.

Michael Feuerstack – Who We Are

Over the past three decades, Montreal-based songwriter Michael Feuerstack has slowly cemented his place among the most celebrated and enduring songwriters in Canadian music, establishing a vast and diverse oeuvre and securing two JUNOs in the process. Before releasing under his own name, Feuerstack used the moniker Snailhouse, and to celebrate thirty years of work, he is returning in 2027 with The Snailhouse Songbook, a double album with Forward Music Group which reimagines a choice selection of songs from the period. Lead single ‘Who We Are’ sets the tone, full of the nuanced, bittersweet spirit which marks so much of Feuerstack’s writing. “At its core, ‘Who We Are’ is a song about being alone in the crowd,” he explains. “How do we seek balance in tending to the isolated and mysterious parts of ourselves while also digging deep into love, patience and kindness as we navigate the outside world? There is a darkness in it, but there’s a beauty that prevails, and a humour that’s maybe almost imperceptible.”

New Balance – Dunce

Back in 2025 we teased a new album from Jeremy Leasure’s New Balance with double single Lemon Slice / Pocket Change, the songs’ ostensibly relaxed sound hiding something much darker as Leasure explored “little devastations.” Now New Balance are finally gearing up to release that album, and as the title To Live And Die In LA, the theme of catastrophe looms large in the shape of natural disaster and human cruelty. Latest single ‘Dunce’ finds Leasure and co. stuck within this disorientating experience, questioning everything in the face on the encroaching ruin. “’Dunce’ came about somewhat by accident,” he explains. “Written a few days after watching Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, I found myself singing ‘I’m the dunce of the universe’ throughout the day without realizing that I’d picked it up from a line Brooks says in the film. It led me to interrogating all the ways that I could be barrelling forward in the wrong direction. Could my belief systems be false? Am I really as confident about these things as I think? If I flipped all of my beliefs would my life be any better? At the end of the day it feels unlikely, but it’s important to live an examined life, otherwise there’s no way to grow.” Watch the video directed and edited by Hallee Morvan and Jeremy Leasure below:

To Live And Die In LA will be released on the 20th November via Anxiety Blanket Records.

Sammy Weissberg – Brass Quintet No. 1 Mvt. II

Last month, we introduced Music For Strings and Brass, the forthcoming record from Brooklyn-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Sammy Weissberg. Writing of lead single ‘String Quartet No.2 Mvt. II’, we described how the album sees Weissberg “channel the spirit of late-Romantic and modernist composers to paint a picture of everyday life in all its elaborate detail and humble simplicity.” Now he’s back with a second glimpse, this time at the record’s second work, a brass quintet that’s all the more melodic and charming following the grand impressionistic emotion of the strings. “[For the second movement] I was feeling very inspired by both Yamandu Costa and ML Buch,” Weissberg describes. “While both songwriters typically compose in a guitar-centric fashion, I thought it would be a fun challenge to translate their influence on me to a totally different instrumentation.”

SNEAL – THE QUEEN

Formed of Michael Coleman, Kurt Kotheimer, Hamir Atwal, Luke Bergman and Katie Jacobson, self-described “organ donor art factory” SNEAL is a “manifestation of these collected organs in a single body that was able to make it to the studio on the train.” Which is to say, the Queens-based project is more than the sum of its parts. New album Military Time welcomes a rotating casts of guests too, with the likes of Sam Evian and Jason Burger just some of the faces which pop up, and is unsurprisingly both the most ambitious and fully-realised release from SNEAL to date. Opener and single ‘The Queen’ sets the tone, a track full of languid swagger and left-field lyrics which plays something like a slow-motion trip through some strange hymenopteran world.

everything is breeding impossibly slow
there’s not a single egg in the nest
suddenly i’m feeling impossibly low
i’m so hot
and the canopy’s wet
i’m so hot and the canopy’s wet

Military Time is out now via Baby El Records and available from Bandcamp.

Wendy Eisenberg – Mmeeaanniinngg Bbuussiinneessss” b/w “Tthhee Wwaallllss”

Earlier this year, Wendy Eisenberg released a self-titled album on Joyful Noise Recordings. The record received much acclaim, including from us, drawing upon all of Eisenberg’s experience and genre-bending innovation to present their most comprehensive and certain artistic statement yet. But if the record itself wasn’t inventive enough, they have just dropped an unexpected follow-up, or rather companion piece, which takes two of the standout tracks and (quite literally) bends and stretches them into new forms. Closer ‘The Walls’ doubles in length, but ‘Meaning Business’ reaches a mammoth 37 minutes, transformed from what was in essence a folk song into something as imaginative and theoretically ripe as a John Cage composition. “I want to write songs that feel infinite,” Eisenberg explains. “I want to write songs that transcend their production, that can weather the changes. It’s probably a holdover from my jazz training, the desire to hear my material in different contexts…Why not literally stretch them, and my songs, out? I want to feel when a slowed-down song becomes ambient music, becomes jazz, becomes something else.”

The post Weekly Listening: October 2026 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.