Lead single and album opener ‘Ida Red’ is the perfect introduction to the style. Taking inspiration from the likes of Linefork, KY banjo player and singer Morgan Sexton, who took classic Appalachian folk music and made it his own with layers of improvisation and quirk, the song finds Joseph Decosimo and co. carrying this torch forward. A blurring of the line between careful craft and inquisitive malleablity, entirely true to the musical history from which is descends yet never restrained by its conventions.

Photo by Robert Birnbach

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Lead single ‘Sunshine State’ hits the ground running. A track which finds Kovac addressing her younger self, delving into the person she was before and during her move from Brisbane to the UK, and how the competing desires for home and escape never really go away. “I found some old journals from when I was a teenager, and they made me reflect on how much I’d changed as a person,” Laura Kovic explains. “There were things about myself that I’d forgotten, but it was clear how much I’d always wanted to move to the UK. I was so keen to get away! From such a beautiful place! So the song is like: I’m going back to the Sunshine State to find my younger, more melodramatic self and catch-up with her.” The result is both confessional and compassionate, allowing past feelings the respect they deserve while acknowledging the ways we change over time, and ultimately coming to offer a nuanced picture of the ways we form relationships to a place.

Part Of The Problem, Baby is out 1st August on Specialist Subject Records and you can pre-order it now from the Fortitude Valley Bandcamp page.

Illustration & album design by Sophie MacKenzie

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This would mean we have a kind of identity that is composed of these negative attributes, things which never had names, which can’t be remembered based on our or at least my default kind of attention. This also extends to processes that run in the background. Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where I am or what stage of development I am at and it’s so devastating to realize how responsible my own narrative is for keeping everything in play that pertains to me. And so much gets lost to that narrative, but also comes back in flashes. So searching became a way to describe actively looking for those kinds of things. 

If Genevieve represented an attempt to perform such a search within a relationship and personal history, then Fust’s new record Big Ugly widens the scope. A reckoning with Southern identity which looks to revive that which is lost to the narrative, and to locate and seriously consider those negative attributes amassed and repressed through the years. That is, to not merely position oneself within a wider history, but to appreciate the endurance of the past in everyday existence. To come to understand that years do not so much expire as accumulate all around. Like love in their debut, Fust offer the past as something persistent, if uneven. Because after all, what are memories if not their own form love?

So while opener ‘Spangled’ kicks things off with a familiar picture of Southern decline (“They tore down the hospital / Out on Route 11 / I’m not sure what happened / Seems like repossession”), the record pays as much attention to that which lasts in spite of everything. A position inspired by a pair of complimentary experiences Dowdy has lived in recent years. Firstly, the occasion he came upon an ancient gutter during a visit to Athens, and was struck by the fact that even our most mundane surroundings are potential monuments of the future. Then were the trips Dowdy took with his grandmother to southern West Virginia, where he came to understand how the histories that might appear to have eroded or dissipated from one person’s perspective were still very much alive from another. Both occasions complicated the boundary between the past and the present. What we once had, we will always have, in one way or another. Ghosts do not vacate their haunting grounds so easily.

As with any ghost story worth its salt, the result is neither wholly horrifying nor romantic. With the symbolic connotations of the title weighing heavy, ‘Spangled’ plays as a kind of alternative national anthem for a long-troubled nation. The realistic twin to its idealised original, detailing the vast, shadowy body of the American iceberg which supports the stars and stripes’ dazzling white mythology upon its tip. There’s God and loss and violence, a kind of directionlessness, heavy liquor, trauma as an echo through the ages. A sense of burning hard and bright and quicker than intended, sometimes arcing upwards but inevitably falling back exactly where you started. Or worse, into a decaying version of that same place.

Big Ugly functions as a detailed picture of such a milieu, offering small glimpses into the lives of various characters which move across the frame. The artwork is a mural taken from the Big Ugly Community Centre that once served as a backdrop to a school play. Here it serves an identical purpose, albeit in a more abstract light. We meet people wandering as though dazed in the post-industrial present, pining for hard labour and good wages, struggling to find hours selling junk at the gas station. Or struggling with small home improvements as their houses slowly fall down around them.

But also, most importantly, we see life continuing its rhythms, memories repeating, hopes emerging still. A picture of Appalachian or Southern life which does not yearn for escape or preach self-improvement, but loves and dreams instead. “They’ll have to haul me off,” as the title track opens. “Off a down slope / in some front end loader / in a pine box / if they want me gone / if they want me lost / If they don’t want my lonesome here / they’ll have to haul me off.” You are from where you are from, after all. A squalid home is home nonetheless, and the funny thing about fondness and pride is how they survive the most naked of truths. Fust aren’t interested in willful ignorance, rose-tinted reminiscence or giddy myth-making. The record wears its name for a reason. They want the big ugly whole.

Big Ugly is out now via Dear Life Records and available from the Fust Bandcamp page.

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Take brand new single, ‘Empty’, released along with a video Emma Geiger directed together with Archer Boyette. “The idea for the video started with the pomegranate without knowing why, just feeling connected to it as something beautiful and strange,” she explains. “But it holds a lot of significance that fits with the song’s themes. It is a symbol of death, abundance, love, and is also in the myth of Persephone, who after eating the seeds of a pomegranate is doomed to spend part of the year in the underworld with Hades.”

Boyette adds vocals to the track too, joining Michael Grigoni (pedal steel) and Emma Kelly (violin) in helping Geiger bring a delicate yet evocative sound to life. The sense of ambiguity is again a key facet, where apparent dualities are challenged and contradicted in much the same way as in the story of Persephone. “The story in ‘Empty’ feels parallel to this myth,” as Geiger continues. “The entrapment in love despite a desire to escape; being convinced by the other to stay. There seem to be endless parallels between the world we created in the video and Persephone’s fate; the river as a boundary between earth and the underworld; the pomegranate pulled from it as though sent from the underworld; submerging in the river as both departure from earth and rebirth. It’s interesting how these myths subconsciously shape our perception of the world.”

No I don’t want to let go
No I don’t want to leave
But I’m not one
To know when I should grieve

‘Empty’ is out now and available from all the usual places.

Photo by Archer Boyette, album art by Adam Sniezek

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Together with bass from Zack Kardon (The Dead Tongues, Indigo De Souza), drums from Joe Westerlund (Sylvan Esso, Megafaun, Bon Iver), and guitar from Justin Morris (Sluice, Sun June), Geiger weaves an ostensibly calm, tender style of folk, though dip beneath the surface and you’ll find a more turbulent mood. The push and pull of competing currents which represent the unseen physics of any relationship. Take latest single ‘All Your Words’, where the contemplative tone belies the interior chaos which underpins the song.

Written during the confounding experience of leaving familiar people and places when the vestiges of fondness remain, ‘All Your Words’ blurs nostalgia and desperation into its conflicted sound. That strange tension between knowing change is needed and being unable to quite picture what might come next. Strings from Emma Kelly (Maple Glider) offer relief in the chorus, hinting towards the potential to move through this state, and the result feels like a memorial to a very specific period. “This song feels like a time capsule of my mental landscape from the time that I wrote it,” as Geiger explains. “It is about dissonance, distance, and wondering what shape resolution could take. It is less of a representation of how I feel today, but in certain moments I can still relate to the confusion I was overwhelmed with at the time.”

Photo by Archer Boyette

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A release which “accepted this state of things, viewing honesty as the first step towards moving forward.” That’s how we described It’s Been a Long Year Vol. 1, the recent EP by the Montreal-based songwriter Alex Nicol. It was a collection of songs “written in a time when the pandemic only underlined years of chronic neglect and saw once bustling towns pushed further into decay,” which presented a lingering sense of loss with a wry playfulness. This December sees Nicol add a second batch of songs to the EP for a full-length album, Been A Long Year Vol​. ​1 & 2, and new single ‘Working On My Tan’ dials into this mood again to offer sound attuned to both the sadness and mysteriousness of the world we have created.

Watch the video by Jérémie Boivin below:

Been A Long Year Vol​.​1 & 2 is out on the 1st December and you can pre-order it now.

Christopher Tignor – Forms In a Flame

Writing of previous single ‘Ritual of a Thousand Limbs‘, we described how Christopher Tignor’s new album The Art of Surrender “explore[s] instinctive territory, pushing the violin towards an almost atavistic sound which foregoes too much planning or intention to instead embrace raw movement.” The album is out now via Western Vinyl, and final single ‘Forms In a Flame’ is the jewel at the heart of the release. A mammoth, near thirteen-minute collision of poignant classical and urgent electronic styles, fragile, aching violin joined by glitter atmospherics and galloping percussion.

Daneshevskaya – Challenger Deep

Daneshevskaya‘s forthcoming album Long Is The Tunnel, out next month on Winspear, presents a peculiar image of time. One “where the past, present and future are treated not as distinct things but rather parts of an encompassing whole,” as we wrote of single ‘Somewhere in the Middle‘. It’s a fitting device for a record which explores how personal histories and present experiences come to shape the world as we experience it. Latest track ‘Challenger Deep’ is typical of the poetic tone of Daneshevskaya’s work, the wistful fondness of the delivery landing somewhere between lullaby, hymn and love song.

There’s a foxhole prayer I say
A mistake I like to make
Saving you for the end
It’s all pinks and reds
There’s a dog chasing the fence
And now I’ll never see you again

Will you wait for me
Where there is no later on
Will you wait for me at the end, the end

Watch the video filmed by Madeline Leshner and edited by Zach Stone below:

Long Is The Tunnel is out via Winspear on the 10th November and you can pre-order it now from the Daneshevskaya Bandcamp page.

Gilded Lows – Brave

After learning the trade as part of Austin jazz punk outfit Dead Swagger, Spencer Carter has since turned his attention to new project Gilded Lows. Taking some of the croon of the previous band and adding a healthy dose of cowboy attitude, Gilded Lows follows a lineage descending from Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Nick Cave. A country style charged by Spencer’s baritone to sound both full of longing and supremely confident. That old cowboy spirit where the wish for a better life is matched only by nostalgia for what was. The result is a present at once fatalistic and self-deprecating. “I’m not brave / I’m not sweet,” Spencer sings at the close of the track, “In fact, I’m the one who’s terrified of feeling much of anything.”

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

Middle Sattre – Pouring Water

“It’s my way of processing internalized homophobia, religious trauma, and shame from growing up gay in the Mormon church,” explains lead Hunter Prueger of Middle Sattre. Writing songs as an act of both confrontation and defiance. The project started as a solo project in Salt Lake City and has since blossomed into a eight-piece in Austin, retaining the intensely personal tone while pushing the instrumentation in all sorts of interesting directions. The result, as captured by new single ‘Pouring Water’, lands somewhere between Sufjan Stevens and Typhoon, where collaboration brings a immersive richness to the sound but never occludes the intimate lyricism at the track’s heart.

Riley Skinner – Dirty

Based in Minneapolis, singer-songwriter Riley Skinner makes music that invites the listener into a world of honest and courageous vulnerability. Next month, she will release new album Surrender, a record that explores queer identity through the lens of the natural world, embracing its inherent chaos to experience the peace and acceptance at its heart. Latest single ‘Dirty’ is a great example, a quietly powerful folk rock song about finding the bravery to be your true self. “When I wrote ‘Dirty’,” Skinner describes, “I was thinking about the ways in which we withdraw from closeness and love because we feel we are not worthy or deserving of receiving it.”

Surrender releases on 10^th November and you can pre-order it now from the Riley Skinner Bandcamp page.

TESHA – Like a man

Back in 2019, we wrote about Growing Pains II by Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based artist TESHA. A collection of songs we called “ethereal yet rooted in personal suffering,” it drew on the likes of  Bjork and Fever Ray to combine experimental electronics with an otherworldly power. Now TESHA is back with a brand new single, ‘Like a Man’, which seethes with righteous anger as it takes aim at the patriarchy and the ongoing unrest in her home country. A dark and pulsating pop song, it urges an end to the masculine posturing and the blind search for power, instead finding strength in compassion and vulnerability.

‘Like a man’ is out now and available from the usual places.

Upper Narrows – My Lottery Dream

While We’re Warm, the upcoming album from Upper Narrows on Repeating Cloud, represents a meeting point between digital and organic sensibilities. “[Tyler] Jackson’s delivery [provides] that human core to what could otherwise be an almost extraterrestrial soundscape,” as we put it in a preview. “His voice [adds] a warmth so often lost in synth pop, and helps the album to live up to its name.” The final single before the album’s release, ‘My Lottery Dream’ furthers this style, leading the listener into a detailed, technological soundscape with the vocals as a guiding hand. But despite the blips and bloops, it maintains a real heartfelt humanity.

Weeper – De Algo Hay Que Morirse

‘De Algo Hay Que Morirse’, the new single from Buenos Aires-based indie pop band Weeper, was written about a recurring dream experienced by lead Mary Craig. “I used to drive people off of cliffs, bridges, etc to our deaths and wake up,” she describes. “When I dreamt the dream with my Argentine partner, he responded, ‘You have to die of something – De algo hay que morirse.’” The song starts gentle and heartfelt as it reflects on the dream’s sense of loss and guilt, but builds in energy as it progresses. “I’m alive and I can’t believe my luck,” Craig sings around the halfway mark as she comes to find a carefree joy in accepting her own mortality.

‘De Algo Hay Que Morirse’ is out now via streaming services.

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We first wrote about Nashville duo Angel Saint Queen back last summer, describing single ‘Diable Lake’ as “a track which highlights the duo’s bittersweet tone, capturing a sadness for leaving and excitement for what comes next.” Latest single ‘You Were There’ is no less conflicted in its tone, evoking the strange blend of sadness and relief left in the wake of a break-up. Though sound’s raw energy embraces the emotion wholeheartedly, building from restrained beginnings into a blaze of feeling. One last conflagration at the end of a fiery relationship before the new dawn arrives.

‘You Were There’ is out now and available from the usual places.

bugcatcher – Desert

The recording project of Rochester‘s Jake Denning and a variety of friends, Bugcatcher operates within the slacker end of the alt-country spectrum, though crafts its DIY aesthetic with a precise hand. With an album coming soon, the outfit have released new single ‘Desert’, a song which both serves as an ode to the titular landscape and a search for meaning within an otherwise barren milieu. “I’m going across the desert / I’ll find the holy land myself,” Denning sings, buoyed by the understated rhythm of the sound. “I’m going across the desert / Got my soul for all my wealth.”

Running across the desert
The walls of Jordan are calling me
Going across the desert
Where dinosaur bones are buried in sleep

C.J. Red Mouth – Red Line

With EP Greenhouse on the horizon, C.J. Red Mouth (AKA Durham, North Carolina songwriter C.J. Yang) has unveiled brand new single, ‘Red Line’. The EP centres on the search from freedom within restrictive systems and relationships, and the single typifies the building catharsis which results. A reflection on an old commute, the slow creeping sound evokes the grimy dark of the Boston subway with guitar from June Isenhart (Miss Bones). The track gathers momentum as though quite literally barrelling toward the light at the end of the tunnel, culminating in an ecstatic finale complete with primal screaming.

Scream over the roaring dark
Scream until I hear myself

Daneshevskaya – Somewhere in the Middle

When Anna Daneshevskaya Beckerman took her Russian-Jewish middle name as the moniker for her songwriting project, she did so with significant intention. Daneshevskaya is also the surname of her grandmother, a poet who helped to cultivate her granddaughter’s creative sensibilities, and ultimately served as great inspiration for Beckerman’s own voice. In this way, Daneshevskaya represents a continuation of her grandmother’s vocation, though one processed through Beckerman’s own distinctive eye for detail, spinning off from poetry into vivid indie rock. Released to celebrate signing with Winspear and an imminent tour supporting Black Country, New Road, new single ‘Somewhere in the Middle’ is the ideal introduction for the uninitiated. A curious, searching song which broaches the subject of identity from an unguarded, almost child-like perspective. “My grandma had two sisters and her parents would say ‘Anita has the looks, Miriam has the books, and Gloria has the charm’,” Beckerman explains. “I used to think about which one I would want to be. I never questioned having to choose.” Watch the video by Mia Duncan below:

‘Somewhere in the Middle’ is out now via Winspear and available from Bandcamp.

Dustin Mayle – Saturn’s Last Ring

Ohio songwriter Dustin Mayle recently released latest album Dear Loretta, a collection of songs which fall into the DIY folk tradition but nevertheless achieve a tangible richness despite their lo-fi leanings. Take single ‘Saturn’s Last Ring’, its intimate acoustic style periodically coalescing into something bigger and bolder before unwinding to its former state just as quickly. Mayle’s vocals add an opaque lyricism, nodding towards the mythic undertones of Jason Molina or Adrienne Lenker, catching onto a repeated refrain as the instrumentation swells, as though having tapped into some kind of incantation.

Hannah Cameron – Smells Like Leaving

Later this year, Naarm / Melbourne singer-songwriter Hannah Cameron will release Holding Pattern, her third studio album. Recorded with producer Matt Redlich in his studio alongside longtime collaborators Luke Hodgson (bass) and Leigh Fisher (drums), the album was written largely on baritone guitar. This is immediately apparent on latest single ‘Smells Like Leaving’, a sombre slow burner that details a post-breakup road trip with wistful pedal steel and evocative lyrics that read like staccato poetry. Watch the very apt video, shot by Cameron herself, below:

The blink and dash
The petty cash
The cigarette that’s burned to ash
Smells like leaving

Holding Pattern releases on 22nd September. Pre-order a copy from the Hannah Cameron Bandcamp page.

Laura Zarougian – Cairo

Self-described as “one part Armenian cowgirl and one part indie rock,” the music of Laura Zarougian draws on everything from mystical desert rock to the wistful classics of Emmylou Harris and Neil Young in order to tell the story of her forebears. New single ‘Cairo’ applies this to the city of its title, casting Egypt as a distant, almost mythical place, one constructed from old tales and holding secrets too. “My father was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt,” Zarougian explains. “What I know of Cairo is from the stories—the ones my father told me, and the ones that were withheld.”

We don’t have the money to bring his body up the Nile
you will marry an older man, remember to smile
Cairo, you’re a gilded frame,
yeah you’ve got the man beguiled
we’re headed on an aeroplane
we won’t see you for a while

I can tell you’re hiding something,
look at you I know you’re bluffing

Nymphlord – Bougainvillea

A combination of “radio-ready pop hooks” and “a ferocious feminist punk energy,” that’s how we described the music of Nymphlord back in May, along with “an ethereal experimentalism that sees acoustic guitar become otherworldly.” With the release of EP Mothers Cry And Then We Die. fast approaching, the LA-based artist has unveiled a brand new single, ‘Bougainvillea’. A song which blurs hectic energy with a downbeat emotional state to paint a subversive picture of California, drawing equally from retro surf rock and contemporary pop to undermine the sunny stereotypes. A landscape where even the prettiest things have teeth.

Hot day
Muggy day
Same thing
Always
I still feel so cold in LA

Mothers Cry And Then We Die. is out on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Wandering Summer – Show Me The Way

Wandering Summer, the new project of Geddy Laurance (Boyracer, City Yelps, Wonderswan), might be rooted in its Leeds home, but it certainly reaches far and wide to bring the sound to life. An amalgamation of bouncy energy and nostalgic fuzz which owes more to New York noise bands or Californian and Glaswegian pop than anything coming out of Yorkshire. Though as their self-titled EP shows, there’s something particular to the sound that marks its place in the world. An ability to evoke both rolling fields and endless terraced housing, simultaneously embracing its surroundings and dreaming of escape. Single ‘Show Me The Way’ sits at the popppiest end of the Wander Summer style, where wistful fondness is only matched by the sense of eager forward motion.

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The name Genevieve carries a particular image. Take the legendary Genevieve of Brabant, a virtuous wife falsely accused of infidelity and sentenced to death, only to escape and raise her child out in the wilderness of the Ardennes. A chaste, maternal figure who did not waver through years of gross injustice. Or Saint Genevieve, a woman at the other end of the family spectrum, devoted to no man but God Himself. A consecrated virgin taken to asceticism and mortification of the flesh. Two women very different in their lifestyles but linked in their ability to maintain dignity when faced with discomfort or persecution. Perhaps one definition of the feminine. Through a series of vignettes and fictional reflections, Fust craft their album around such imagery, offering a picture of love as a persistent yet uneven thing. Something to be fuelled, protected, practised and ritualised. Modest in its own way and sacrosanct because of it. A painting never quiet finished, an ongoing crisis. A quiet thing performed in the grey hollows of the everyday.

We took the opportunity to speak with Dowdy about Genevieve, touching on everything from the idea of a ‘quiet life’ and latent religiosity to the significance of the cover art and the importance of film, not to mention the team of collaborators who helped bring the record to life.

Can we talk a little about the title? The name Genevieve carries a certain image. Feminine, familial, humble, virtuous. Is Genevieve a real person? And why did you decide to give the album that name?

The name Genevieve doesn’t reference anyone in particular—it’s more trying to conjure that image of marriage and family you’re getting at. Our last record Evil Joy took the point of view of a couple’s crack-up, and so I wanted to try something a bit more agreeable this time. That title referenced an ecstatically selfish feeling whereas this title references someone else’s name, so there is a marked shift in perspective toward someone or something other than yourself at play here. And it might sound strange but Genevieve is, to me at least, a marriage record. It has at its core songs about commitment. But that doesn’t mean it’s free of the kind of darkness I tend to like in songwriting, because the lesson of commitment is that one ultimately commits to the things they dislike in another person: not just to the charms but to the grievances, resentments, to the ego blows that can never be curbed. I got married during the period I wrote the songs that went into this record and I wanted to find a way to write about marriage in my own way. My partner is at this point used to me writing songs that are quite pitiful when it comes to presenting relationships. But I think there’s something really valuable in narrating from the other side of whatever is going on in your life—trying to get at something loving in a roundabout way. 

The song ‘Genevieve’ was the first song that to me sounded right, that made me excited for the album. It became the key song for me, not conceptually but as a recording, as the compass for how the rest of the record should sound. Conceptually, it’s probably a strange choice for the title track. Whereas a character like Sarah Lee in ‘Town in Decline’ is a marriage figure in a stable relationship, Genevieve figures a much more complicated kind of relationship. In short, it is a song about two people who have inbuilt into the very nature of their relationship a vow of silence. It’s the same couple, I think, in the album’s last song ‘A Clown Like Me’. I am really struck by such a relationship, considering that the common sense approach suggests that your partner is the one person you’re truly open and honest with, or is I guess ideally such a person. The characters in the title track for whatever reason don’t talk to each other in a way that could sustain them living together: something is unshareable even if a desire to share may exist. There is a dissonance that is exciting to me in a song that uses the name most evocative of marriage and family to describe a relationship that falls apart for lack of communication. Or if not lack of communication, two people who simply cannot for the life of them put into words their commitments.

Genevieve is one of many names strewn throughout the lyrics—none of them real in any direct sense. I think giving character to certain ideas and problems was really helpful for me in writing this record, throughout which there are a number of I guess female archetypes. For instance, in ‘Violent Jubilee’ there is the girl in black who—apart from having a long history in the gothic tradition—is a figure in Appalachian folklore where I am from in southwest Virginia who would visit and requite unfaithful husbands. A figure like that works for me because that song is about having children and there is a certain tension between the woman in black who is pregnant and ‘Angel’ who has no children. It’s this kind of combination I really like to write into songs. Genevieve is an archetypal “wife” I guess but she is also a saint and so a figure absolutely outside of the family. You often see her holding a loaf of bread, which is just lovely, and I’m moved by the kind of poverty that comes with saintliness but also I know it’s a hard thing to sustain in a marriage. So I like that combination. And a small thing that led me finally to decide on it as the title was that she is often called upon as the saint of disasters such as widespread fever and this is a record made in the aftermath of the pandemic.

There was an interesting relationship with time present on your previous record, Evil Joy. The classic yearning of country music juxtaposed with the anxiety of a finite life, dreams of better days challenged by the sense that the months and years were accelerating—there might not be a future after all. Is it fair to say Genevieve is more settled in its outlook? No less wistful, still full of longing, but maybe making peace with time’s habit of passing? I think the artwork captures the mood perfectly?

The cover is a painting by Sasha Popovici, who also painted the Evil Joy cover. He is really exceptional and known for painting a kind of magical realism, for landscapes that harbor something that doesn’t belong, usually shapes or geometries that somehow cut open or interrupt the grandeur of the view. I obviously really like this tension, but for both covers I asked for something else. With Evil Joy it was a kind of a natural non-place, something like a nowhere Eden where you might spend a night on the lam. That painting fit the themes of that record, the ones you mention: finite life, longing, temporariness, leaving, a kind of normalized malevolence.

With Genevieve, I asked for a domestic scene that is unfinished. We looked at Pissarro a lot, rural scenes of daily life and labor. And I especially wanted a painting that, even if it was incomplete, still showed that it was nonetheless committed to a perspective, to a scene that could be completed or that once was completed but is no longer in full view. I taped up the image and hand-wrote the name as if it belonged to a scrapbook or work journal, as if even this inaccessibility of the implied image is itself a memory or wishful thinking, not something that claims to be anything more. It is this kind of sense of being “settled” I really like: you have an image of domestic life that can’t itself really come to completion and so it is this very inability that you settle for.

And of course unfinishedness has everything to do with time as you describe it: a time suspended, uncertain, in progress, ongoing. We struggled with the cover. I don’t think it was easy for Sasha to paint an unfinished painting without taking the image too far. I love that most about the cover, that Sasha didn’t want it to stop there, that there was a more fully formed future that he wanted for it but which for me would have been wrong. It turned out to be a very still, quiet image that can nonetheless evoke this kind of crisis. And for me this is all very close to the kind of situations whose point of view Fust tries to take up. 

As a related question, there’s a certain… I’m hesitant to call it smallness because some of the tracks have an almost sublime weight (I mean, just listen to ‘Violent Jubilee’), but some modesty or grounded quality to the album. It stands out on tracks like ‘Town in Decline’, which takes on a subject matter so often portrayed in a tortured, desperate light and leavens it with an understated, everyday quality. Post-industrial America as a place of getting by and making do. Did you approach the record with these ideas in mind? 

Yes, there is a certain attraction to what ‘Rockfort Bay’ names “small life” on this record. This can mean so many things and I probably project too much on to it, but I think it means a life that doesn’t attempt to be historical, that may even be seen as ineffectual. How do you defend having a small life today? What imagery do we have of small life? Is it simply recourse to something like pre-capitalist imagery? The themes I work with in this regard probably come across as something like the division between town and country, especially because there is historically a defense of the latter in music like this. It’s difficult because there is a kind of conservatism that seems to immediately accompany the country that the city and its vanguard get to avoid. But I actually think tending to the imagery of smaller lives and the country themes that feel appropriate to it grants a greater sense, as you say, of the effects of deindustrialization today. 

Visual references to the present state of the US economy is nothing new. Beyond the whole of the folk tradition, we can even say that most of the music I really gravitate towards from the 70s and 80s was music determined by a time which we can now identify as the start of this crisis in industrialization. This is some variation on a return-to-the-roots music in this or that way. So thinking about the way a song can express the state of things and also that country imagery becomes important for that, I think, is embedded in the very fabric of this kind of songwriting practice I am hopefully a part of. Beyond that, I am also attracted to literature and films that signal a kind of retreat of both the radical and earthy 60s, the settling down of radicals or hippies, having kids, getting jobs, always trying to keep the pulse even as it is clearly fading away. Small stories about small life in a dying and stagnated country. 

‘Town in Decline’ is in many ways a reflection on my hometown and on my parents. I grew up in Bristol, in southwest Virginia, which was never a serious industrial center—kind of a stopover at the foothills of coal country that was built up as a railroad junction. But my father has worked all of my life in the major chemical plant in the area, which is a good provider but he always seemed to me someone also trying to keep the pulse on something more utopian despite the job. My mom taught at the elementary school and through her point of view I came to realize just how poor the area is. It is that kind of industrial context alongside a certain sensitivity to small town dynamics and to the economic difficulty of that region that I think drives certain songs on the record. 

Could we talk a little about the track ‘Searchers’? The idea there’s some inherent value or meaning in the act of searching for something, even if the act is performed without quite knowing what you’re looking for. “Drag the river, feel alive tonight,” as the lyrics read. The song seems to encapsulate so much of what the album, and indeed Fust as a project, is all about. Harnessing the tension of an unanswered question as an energizing force. But then of course, there’s an irony to the concept of a search party, because, depending on the circumstance, they might not necessarily want to find what they’re looking for… 

Thank you for this—I think you’re right. In all honesty, I am probably more drawn to a certain religious dimension of things than I care to admit. Above all I tend to romanticize collectives, and in particular collective practices. The religious aspect I guess would be a collective plan to pursue that which is for now beyond grasp or which seems to slip away just as you notice it. This kind of thing seems today to be a very secular or quiet act and I wanted to think again about its more communal forms. ‘Searchers’ started as a collection of poetry trying to describe a “search party” in various ways, as a political party or house party but also as something that looks like a regular search party but which isn’t sensationalized, isn’t a media spectacle. Just people out together looking very carefully. And the thought just took shape around the possibility that maybe they weren’t really looking for anything in particular, or didn’t know what they were looking for.

The attempt to turn it into a song started as a thought around what one loses in a given experience, that so much of our life is blocked out or forgotten almost immediately in order to forge ahead. This would mean we have a kind of identity that is composed of these negative attributes, things which never had names, which can’t be remembered based on our or at least my default kind of attention. This also extends to processes that run in the background. Sometimes I wake up and don’t know where I am or what stage of development I am at and it’s so devastating to realize how responsible my own narrative is for keeping everything in play that pertains to me. And so much gets lost to that narrative, but also comes back in flashes. So searching became a way to describe actively looking for those kinds of things. 

The way you bring Fust as a project into this is really nice. I think it’s totally right: there’s never a plan to make music, just a project in place with a general horizon that music will be made. Having that structure in place means music could be waiting at any point with no dictate on what it will be. I try to do this with as many things as possible: having a number of “search parties” out whose only precondition is the search itself, be they music projects or writing projects or whatever. These are what undergird the “greater kind of looking” I am talking about in the song. I think I suffer from inattention so having ways to look in place is crucial. It’s an ethic maybe, one that is tied also to having low expectations. If anything is found, that should be exciting. It should also be said that the title references John Ford, so I think there is a sort of effort to conjure the American West here in some way but also to update it. Something like a group of American searchers without an object, without a goal. Seems to me the case, in a way…

Who or what do you consider to be the biggest influences on your work? Would you say you draw on artforms beyond music? 

The simplest answer is that the people in my life are the biggest influence: my friends, especially those who also make music, my family, etc. I’ve been making music for so long without any label or music culture behind it that having a few people interested and who themselves also make things that largely go unnoticed is enough to feel like I am contributing to something. This is something I think a lot of people relate to, and goes into what I was saying earlier about making a kind of music that is proportional to having a “small life.”

In terms of musical influences, I would say Fust really comes out of an attention to lost, forgotten, privately-produced music, particularly songwriting. I am definitely indebted to the big, big hitters like Van Morrison or Gram Parsons or the Basement Tapes extended universe, but I think what I really like are songs that are so clearly homemade by people who are so clearly… unmarketable. A big influence for us on this record, as an example, was ‘All of It’ by Circuit Rider. It’s bewildering, a kind of southern rock slow burner without much of a structure, an inebriated rant of a song that feels like they couldn’t for the life of them be helped to make it sound quite right. And yet, it’s an ideal recording of a band for me, which is what Genevieve was: the first time in my life that a working band went into a studio to record itself, to record songs I wrote.

I am definitely someone who likes to be influenced and wears his influences proudly. Outside of music, I would say I especially rely on cinema for a sense of things. Similarly with music, I like films that reflect a certain homemade quality. Take Jon Jost’s films, for example. He succeeds in his films at capturing an American sensibility that I aspire to with such minimal means. They look and feel impoverished while also providing really small narratives of poverty that he is so sensitive to. He works with a degree of independence that determines the narrative experiment, is full of non-actors, and is committed to regional filmmaking. While his narratives are gestural, they also arrive out of massive historical stakes. For instance, in Bell Diamond a marriage is torn apart due to the husband’s sterility from exposure to agent orange in Vietnam, a story whose backdrop is unemployment in a post-industrial mining town. It’s the perfect combination for me, someone who has a small community of collaborators and wants narratives both quaint and colossal. Jost also writes his own country songs and puts them in his films. I don’t know how exactly but you can tell film and music are somewhat flattened in Jost’s world, like one doesn’t take precedence over the other. And this kind of flattening of forms is something I really take seriously. Finding a song you actually love can be just as rewarding as writing a song. Both feel so rare.

I have to ask about the collaborators on the record. In many ways Genevieve plays like a singular personal creation, but there was a wide cast of talent who helped bring it to life. How do you go about working with others, and how much do they shape the final sound?  

I started writing songs twenty years ago this September. Whatever the name or aim of the project, it has always been variations on a bedroom recording project, so largely a solo effort. But I would always bring people in or find ways to involve people in whatever I was doing. Genevieve is the first time I have recorded my music in a studio, and so this is the first time I’ve really resigned to anyone else’s judgment. Going into it, I had in mind something like Dylan’s New Morning, not only because I always thought of it as a marriage record, but because it sounds so haphazard, thrown together, like he himself was in full strange control but couldn’t tell you what the musicians actually played because the whole point was surrendering to their habits. That’s what I wanted ultimately: my songs at the whim of people I’ve come to trust. 

So first of all, the band is made up of people who are all in other bands and those bands are all bands I actively listen to and am overwhelmed by. John [Wallace] makes music as Colamo, and he has been my partner in all things music since high school. It’s his distorted intensity on guitar that makes Genevieve feel like a legitimate rock record, which is so exciting for me to hear. Justin [Morris] fronts Sluice and has one of the most gentle senses for music I’ve ever heard. His record Radial Gate just came out this year and it is so masterful. Oli [Child-Lanning] is in Sluice but also fronts the avant-traditional project Weirs, which is a well kept secret that if you know about then you’ll know the careful degree of history he brings to the music he is part of. Avery [Sullivan] drums with Sluice and Indigo de Souza, and the band version of Fust really feels to me like a long collaboration with him: endless conversations about what the point of all of this is but also how important small details are in making music listenable. I think he is a true supporter in all things he is a part of and he definitely feels like the support structure for the band. Frank [Meadows] plays piano in Fust and has been my most consistent and most active collaborator in music over the past decade. He also works at Dear Life, the label that releases our music, and we are where and who we are because of him.

I definitely embraced the studio format and invited as many people to be on the record as possible. It’s ultimately a very North Carolina record. Courtney [Werner] plays fiddle on the record and is in Magic Tuber Stringband, a now legendary folk experiment from Durham. Indigo [De Souza], who is from Marshall, sings on the record and it goes without saying that she is one of the most powerful voices in music today; she is also genuinely such a sensitively kind person and every time I hear her voice on the record I light up. Jake [Lenderman] and Xandy [Chelmis] are part of the MJ Lenderman/Wednesday universe from Asheville and are just exceptional players, it’s ridiculous how talented those guys are. Jake released music on Dear Life as well so it felt like a necessary collaboration. We recorded in Asheville—where I used to live a decade ago—with Alex Farrar at Drop of Sun Studios. I knew Alex from back then but had lost touch and didn’t really know what he was up to. The record sounds the way it does because of him. He also worked with Jake and Indigo, so it was all very easy to bring these collaborations together. Beyond his skill, the best thing about Alex is that he works intuitively: he makes decisions as he goes and so he really is a member of the band in that way, someone who just guides the music home. And I must add that John Winn, a filmmaker from Durham, has been one of my major collaborators. He has directed all of the videos for Fust. I’ve never met anyone who understands the landscape’s relationship to the cinematic image more than him and its an honor to have my music heard through that vision. Lastly, though sadly not from North Carolina, Michael [Cormier-O’Leary] recorded vocals on the record. He has been the biggest supporter of Fust and I really owe him everything. He is one of my favorite songwriters—a true contributor to the great weirdo American songbook—and drums in Friendship, perhaps the smartest band out there today.

Genevieve is out on the 16th June via Dear Life Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Album art by Sasha Popovici, photos by Charlie Boss

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This sense of reflection is inherent across the album, as is the manner in which it shapes ideas of the future too. As though everything exists as both an opening and aftermath, and every end carries the implicit possibility of undoing itself. Be it in morose build of ‘How Silly’ or warm promise of ‘Satellites’, or indeed the vulnerability of ‘Happy’. The sense of constantly working through something which has happened while never losing hope some new dawn is about to break.

“A slow-burning meditation on leaving a place you have come to love which finds itself caught between melancholic reminiscence, a fear of the unknown and the persistent hope latent within every instance of change,” as we wrote of ‘Little Apartment’ in a preview, which incidentally turns out as a pretty apt description of Gas Station Blue as a whole. “But what really stands out,” we continued, “is Spencer Thomas Smith’s patience amid such a swirl of emotions. A sense of compassion and fondness which outlives any present uncertainty.”

And all I can ever give you
is something you can only see inside
so take your time, the water’s fine
shake the blues off one by one
I’ll be here when you wake up

Gas Station Blue is out now and available from the usual places.

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His latest album While You Were Sleeping, released last month on Sleepy Cat Records, draws on a lifetime spent listening to old field recordings and getting to know the region’s elders, capturing the small gestures and idiosyncrasies of the old styles and, ultimately, continuing their legacy. “I’m exploring the power and experimental possibilities of an older, weirder America,” Decosimo describes. “A site of profound, less regulated creativity and expression.”

The record opens with ‘The Fox Chase’, originally by Tennessee ballad singer Dee Hicks, who along with his wife contributed over 400 songs to the folk archives at the Library of Congress. As the title suggests, it’s a song about a fox hunt, the singer listing his dogs affectionately as they chase the fox “from old England to old Kentucky.” Like almost every song on the album, it’s shot through with an almost intangible sense of melancholy, a document of the loss of not just treasured hounds but of families, as well as a sense of belonging and a way of life.

‘The Fox Chase’ tumbles beautifully into the instrumental ‘Lost Gander’, another Dee Hicks song that was intended to evoke the sound of wild geese flying overhead at night. The two tracks come complete with a video directed and edited by Gabe Anderson//Strange Bug, with character animation and watercolors by Larissa Wood, which captures the imagery perfectly:

Decosimo approaches these songs with the innate feel of a native and the expert knowledge of a folklorist, expanding and updating them with a careful hand. There’s no pale imitation here, no wannabe folksinger posturing. The record’s authenticity is apparent in every pluck and thump and pump organ wheeze. The result feels almost mystical in the way it conjures traditions and communities, transporting the listener to a quiet porch in a secluded holler, away from the bustle of conventional twenty-first century living.

“When the old ballad singers sang, they believed in the worlds that they sang about. You can feel it,” says Decosimo, inadvertently describing the very effect he captures with his own music. “When I hear a field recording of the great Tennessee ballad singer Dee Hicks calling up the foxhounds on ‘The Fox Chase’ or recounting Napoleon’s son’s demise on ‘Young Rapoleon’, I feel like he’s inviting me into a new world—one filled with a different set of possibilities.”

Another standout is ‘Trouble’, a take on a recording by Virgil Anderson, a player from the Tennessee mountains where Decosimo grew up. Decosimo picks at the banjo and is joined by Stephanie Coleman on fiddle and Joe O’Connell on pump organ, all three coming together to sing the chorus in unison. It’s a song rich with a sense of unwavering faith, though stands relevant not just for believers but secular folks too. A mantra to hold on to as we move through this chaotic world, one suffused with a quiet joy in the knowledge that even the worst of times won’t last, that better things lie ahead.

It’s trouble, trouble. There’s trouble everywhere.
Trouble, trouble. There’s trouble everywhere.
Trouble, trouble, there’s trouble all around.
But Lord, Lord, trouble can’t last always.

The album’s title is taken from the final lines of ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’, as sung in a field recording of Retta Spradlin. “Oh while you were sleeping,” Decosimo sings, “while you were slumbering, I was sleeping in the clay.” The version harks back to the song’s earlier iterations, and the imagery of that final line lingered with Decosimo. “As we slumber our minds construct new worlds from fragments of experience,” he explains. “These dream worlds can be familiar or unfamiliar. Sometimes they’re both at once. Slumbering is a time of inactivity: We rest in oblivion as the world moves ahead in its way, inflicting fresh wounds and generating new sources of wonder.”

This quote is a poignant one, capturing the essence of what makes While You Were Slumbering such a special record. The album itself is like one of the dreams Decosimo speaks of, a place where the past is resurrected and reimagined, where people never really die, and we can find refuge and solace from the worries and woes of the waking world. Which is not to say the album is some folly or exercise in diversion. It’s a deeply serious piece of art, a collage of memories, histories and traditions overlaid like the double exposure photograph on the cover art—perhaps not quite as it was but still evocative, still beautiful.

This is the ultimate triumph of While You Were Slumbering. Joseph Decosimo has made a record that’s not derivative of traditional folk music, nor even simply inspired by it. It’s a genuine addition to the lineage, complete with the peculiarities, the eccentricities and the sense of genuine feeling. And with this authenticity comes something deeper, an intersection of art and history that is both moving and sustaining. “This music is about nourishment,” as Decosimo puts it in his liner notes. “It’s about the idea that good old things—not the burdensome stuff—can still sustain us and fill us. Maybe, in the best of circumstances, it can even help us to heal or at least connect with a healing impulse. Or maybe it just opens a clearing where we can rest a bit.”

While You Were Slumbering is out now on Sleepy Cat Records and available via their webstore or the Joseph Decosimo Bandcamp page.

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