“The band’s first new release since 2022, new album The Big E promises to be every bit as ambitious and intense as previous releases, finding the trio further apart geographically, but tight knit in their vision and execution.” That’s how we described the new full-length from Editrix back in June, with the lead single and title track introducing a sound “charged with energy yet slightly unnerved in tone, playing like the chaotic, frantic internal landscape of someone gripped by neurotic concerns.” With release fast approaching via  Joyful Noise Recordings, Wendy Eisenberg and co. are back with new single ‘Flesh Debt’. A track sensual in more ways than one, blending a physical, muscular sound with coy, murmured vocals. “The internal band nickname for this song is ‘Horny Jail’,” the band described when asked about the track, “that should tell you all you need to know.”

Foot Ox – Horseshoe

Teague Cullen’s Foot Ox project arose from the Phoenix-Tempe scene that has given the world the likes of AJJ and Stephen Steinbrink, and since 2007 has been an outlet for narrative-driven experimental folk. The project has always been a collaborative one, but new record A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes, which comes out next month on Ernest Jenning Record Co. takes things a step further. A rotating cast of musicians provide their talents, including a full string section, allowing things to move from hushed intimacy to full-band bombast, often within the same song. Latest single ‘Horseshoe’ is a good introduction, a track Cullen says is “about those big, uncontrollable forces in life […] losing people because of circumstances, and trying to follow your heart even when things get chaotic.”

herbal tea – Seventeen

The recording project of Bristol songwriter Helena Walker, herbal tea has won attention with a beguiling blend of dream pop, ambient and indie folk sensibilities, Walker’s home recordings spreading via word of mouth and eventually earning her invitations to play with the likes of Gia Margaret and Ex:Re. Of course, such high profile fans only cause a reputation to snowball, and it’s little surprise the debut herbal tea full-length Hear as the Mirror Echoes not only attracted the attention of Gold Day in the UK but also VSF favs Orindal Records in the US. With the album set for release at the end of August, herbal tea has unveiled single ‘Seventeen’ by way of introduction. One of the earliest songs of the project which has morphed continually over the years, settling here as a characteristically cinematic, textured slice of ambient folk which evokes both the slow aftermath of trauma and the slower process of transcending its overbearing weight.

Watch the video below, directed and shot by Chris Pugh and edited by Walker along with Henry C Sharpe:

Hear as the Mirror Echoes will be released via Orindal Records and Gold Day on 29th August. Pre-order it now from the herbal tea Bandcamp page.

Mae Powell – Contact High

With prior singles ‘Rope You In‘ and ‘Tangerine‘,  Bay Area songwriter Mae Powell has introduced the sincerity and heart of forthcoming album Making Room For The Light. The former saw Powell put comfort front and centre and the latter championing heart-on-sleeve earnestness, the songs set up a record unashamed to show compassion, not least to the self. Latest track ‘Contact High’ is no different, taking inspiration from an unlikely source to offer another affirming sound. “The idea for ‘Contact High’ came when my stoner elderly neighbor Phil suggested I write a song called contact high, but about good vibes instead of about weed,” Powell explains. “We laughed at this concept together but it stuck in my mind, and when one of my best friends was going through a tough time I used the idea to write her a song that might help her see what it feels like to be around her radiant energy.”

Making Room For The Light comes out on 15th August via Karma Chief and Colemine Records. Order it now from the Mae Powell Bandcamp page.

Mr Butterfield – The Train Left the Station//Big Oak Tree

Throughout this Spring, Portland, Oregon outfit Mr Butterfield have released a couple of great singles, first ‘Lamp is On’ and later ‘Bonnie Jean’. Our first introduction to a band—that’s Lee Butterfield (vocals and guitar), Penny Olives (drums), Kyle Raquipiso (bass) and Tim Kam (guitar)—who make an easygoing, countryfied rock ‘n roll. Their new release, double single The Train Left the Station/Big Oak Tree, doubles down on the country side of things, kicking off with the titular poem by “The Lonesome Cowboy Iz” set to galloping drums and subtly squealing guitar. “The train left the station like a bullet from a gun,” goes the opening line, “we were left there waiting, like a puddle in the sun.” ‘Big Oak Tree’ on the other hand is a joyously ramshackle lo-fi country rock song about taking a nap in the shade of an oak, complete with a catchy chorus (“there’s a big oak tree somewhere above me!”) and extended guitar outro. Check it out, it’s a lot of fun.

Okkyung Lee – good morning, harrison, it’s time to go

South Korean cellist and composer Okkyung Lee has been working at the sharp edge of experimental music for over two decades. Her new album for French label and publisher Shelter Press is no different. Informatively titled Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, it’s what the label describe as “a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives. It reinterprets experimental music as a practice or pursuit, something made for the process of creation itself rather than the end product. It also sees Lee move away from the cello for the first time, something immediately obvious on single ‘good morning, harrison, it’s time to go’, which sees soft plinky keys fall like summer raindrops over a second bubbling keyboard line.

Pegg – Baseball Season

The music of Pegg, that’s the Brooklyn-based project helmed by Xander Duell, has always pushed the envelope in terms of style, championing a fundamentally collaborative ethos to reimagine the boundaries of indie rock. Take 2024’s self-titled debut, cinematic, finely honed and constantly surprising record which moved with both swagger and mystery. But if you thought Duell and co. has settled into a groove with the album, think again, because latest release Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” Pegg & Van Dyke Parks pushes out further into the avant garde. As the title suggests, the release sees Pegg joined by esteemed arranger, composer, performer and producer Van Dyne Parks, and mammoth single ‘Baseball Season’ hints at the ambition which underpins the exercise. A song of great detail and ambiguous meaning, channelling both the wistful familiarity (and thus melancholy) of its titular period, but also the near sublime sense of stakes. “Baseball is life,” as Duell puts it. “Decisions made in baseball can affect the rest of the season, a microcosm to the decisions you make in life. ‘Baseball Season’ is about choosing your proverbial horse wisely, delicately.” 

Presque Tout: Variations no. 435-514 “Baseball Season,” Pegg & Van Dyke Parks is out now via IS NOT MUSIC. in physical form, including a CD edition and jigsaw puzzle (yes, really), and will be released digitally on the 19th September. Find everything on the Pegg Bandcamp page.

Rival Consoles – Soft Gradient Beckons

Last week Rival Consoles released new full-length album Landscape from Memory via Erased Tapes, a record we’ve described as “focusing in on small details while retaining the grand sweeps of melancholy and euphoria” to ultimately “[retain] a sense of humanity within its digital sound.” To celebrate the record, Ryan Lee West enlisted the help of artist and filmmaker Anthony Dickenson to create a video for the single ‘Soft Gradient Beckons’. Dickenson spent twelve months creating the hand-painted frame animation at its centre, matching the care and craft of the track with its own painstaking process of creation. “Each image became a fragment of memory, layered and stitched together to explore rhythm, decay, and time,” Dickenson describes. “The result is a piece that moves with the emotional undercurrent of the track—quietly pulsing, always evolving.”

Landscape from Memory is out now via Erased Tapes. Purchase a copy from the Rival Consoles Bandcamp page.

U – Is It A Kind Of Dream?

Described by label Lex Records as “working an archivist, collagist and chronicler through careful sonic curation,” the mysterious and suitably un-Googleable project U has made a name by refusing to be pigeonholed, its forays out into the general zones of techno, experimental electronic, ambient and modern classical never lingering long enough to be claimed by any one space. Latest release, double a-side single Black Vaughan / Is It A Kind Of Dream?, shows just how wide the U sonic palette can be. The former, which feels indebted to the soundtracks of Kurosawa films, offers a meditation on violence and dread in all of its poignant unease, while the haunting latter feels altogether more Lynchian in its oneiric strangeness.

Black Vaughan / Is It A Kind Of Dream? is out now via Lex Records.

The post Weekly Listening: July 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“There’s something of Kraftwerk in the sound, a smidge of Suicide and no small amount of Lou Reed, though the blend of digital and organic tones is clearly the product of a singular imagination.” That’s how we described the work of Turin-born, Toronto-based ‘poetic jazz rock’ songwriter Fortunato Durutti Marinetti back in 2023, writing about the album Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean. Now FDM is returning with new album Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, what label Quindi Records describe as “his most sweeping, absurd, and emotionally acute statement to date,” and lead single ‘Full of Fire’ hints at the maximalist style at its heart. A song which takes inspiration from iconoclasts like Annette Peacock, Rickie Lee Jones, Donald Byrd, Brigitte Fontaine and Fabrizio De André to paint love as something equal parts fond and fatal.

Green Gardens – Stroom

Leeds ‘feudal indie rock’ outfit Green Gardens have been sharing new material in recent weeks, with singles ‘Year of Love’ (which saw the band, as we wrote, “swapping out some of the grand scale in favour of increased intimacy”) and ‘Ghost of a Tree’ (a song “embodying the spirit of a band who make no distinction between the intimate and the sublime,” as we put it, “positioning an individual’s loves and losses within an almost geolgical span of time”) introducing a slightly new direction for the outfit. The releases have been building up to the announcement of Thistlesifting, a brand new full-length coming later this simmer via Tiny Library Records, and now Green Gardens have unveiled latest single ‘Stroom’ to further whet appetites.

Watch the video made by Joel Johnston and Chris Aitchison below:

Thistlesifting will be released via Tiny Library Records on the 25th August and you can pre-order it now.

Greg Freeman – Curtain

Later this summer, Burlington, Vermont songwriter Greg Freeman is returning with Burnover, a brand new full-length via Transgressive Records and Canvasback Music. It’s a record which pairs laidback country twang with indie rock momentum, furthering the singular style Freeman introduced back in 2022 with previous LP I Look Out. New single ‘Curtain’ captures the mix of playful lyricism and charged energy which makes up the release, Sam Atallah’s piano driving proceedings but Freeman’s vocals stealing the stage. Assured and surprising verbose, like a stream of consciousness unfurling with equal parts conversational immediacy and poetic grace.

My thoughts die out slowly on the blood swept plains where I see you every night
And to the lonely hours, it’s like burning the furniture to keep the house bright at night

The night is getting late and the horns have all been blown
And the drummer’s looking cock-eyed on his rusty metal throne
And I’m somewhere in the distance and you’re somewhere at home

Watch the video directed by Carl Elsaesser below:

Burnover will be released on the 22nd August via Transgressive Records and Canvasback Music and you can pre-order it now.

John Also Bennett – Easter Daydream

His first album for Shelter Press since 2019 solo debut Erg Herbe, John Also Bennett returns this July with new full-length Ston Elaióna. The record—titled ‘in the olive grove’ in Greek—sees the US-born, Athens, Greece-based composer, flautist and multi-instrumentalist blur the lines between the ancient and the contemporary, the physical and metaphysical, with electroacoustic compositions every bit as precise and spacious as fans of JAB will have come to expect. Lead single ‘Easter Daydream’ welcomes the audience into the world of the record, a soundscape built from subtle bass flute and synth which allows the real world to bleed in. Namely the bells from a procession captured during Orthodox Holy Week down the road from Bennett’s apartment in Athens, sounds which have a strangely dualistic effect on the mood, both haunting the track and charging it with immediacy.

Michael Beach – Poison Dart

We’ve long followed the work of Naarm/Melbourne-based songwriter Michael Beach, with 2021 record Dream Violence winning a place among our favourite albums of the year. “Beach reaches into the grab bag of rock history and fashions what he finds into something timely and unique,” we wrote. “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.” Such a description might have captured the record’s searing heart, though does a disservice to the overall tone of Beach’s work. Because while there is an undeniable darkness, it is often sublime in nature, and certainly anything but nihilistic in its intentions. A fact made clear by new record Big Black Plume, coming soon via Poison City and Goner Records, which works with perhaps the only form of optimism left.  “I was wrestling with the beauty and intensity of the natural world and coming to grips with the human destruction of it,” as Beach explains. “I have an overwhelming sense that humans will come and go, and the world we depend on will outlast us.” Listen to new single ‘Poison Dart’ now:

Watch the video below, directed by Alexandra Millen with cinematography from Claire Giuffre:

Big Black Plume will be released on the 25th July via Poison City and Goner Records and you can pre-order it now.

Omo Cloud – Ultimate Love

Later this month sees the release of Mausoleum, the debut album from Cole De La Isla’s Omo Cloud on Dusty Mars Records. The album sees the San Diego songwriter reckon with their past with the intention, as per the title, of burying it and moving on. The result, as shown by lead single ‘Ultimate Love’, is every inch as bittersweet as that might sound. Enduring the painful process of returning to old traumas in order to redefine the present and future. “I feel like I spent a lot of my teenhood being very angsty and existential and cynical in a lot of ways, but I don’t want that to be the takeaway of the record at all,” De La Isla explains. “I feel the takeaway is actually a very optimistic one. We’re all capable of growth and change, and it is a lot of work, but it is worth it. I want people to trust their gut. I want to help people connect with hard emotions—and I want people to be inspired.”

Mausoleum is out on the 27th June via Dusty Mars Records and available to pre-order now.

Pacing – Nothing! (I wanna do)

Led by Katie McTigue, Pacing has been catching our eye for a number of years with a sound at once fun, idiosyncratic and deceptively heartfelt. “[Pacing] follows in the playful, tongue-in-cheek tradition of the likes of Kimya Dawson,” as we put it back in 2023, “yet always nudges the ideas further to be more than mere twee humour or sardonic fun.” After a number of successful collaborations and a high profile tour with Cheekface, this summer sees McTigue return with PL*NET F*TNESS, a new album on Asian Man Records, and latest single ‘Nothing! (I wanna do)’ suggests Pacing is firing on all cylinders. Inspired by a brain-numbing commute along Highway 85, the song is described as “a classic upbeat depression banger” (“we are all entitled to one per album, and I’m using mine now,” as McTigue says), and embodies the mission which has long lurked beneath the surface of the project. Because, when you peel back the wry humour and off-the-wall personality, it becomes clear Pacing is asking how we are supposed to live beneath the weight of all that is asked of us. How might we find meaning in a banal world?

Watch a live video for the single below, with gig footage by Hali Tauxe and b-roll by errbody:

PL*NET F*TNESS is out on the 25th July via Asian Man Records.

R&D – Everything Becomes a Sign

We’ve long followed the work of Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel) and Rebecca El-Saleh (Kitba) in their own respective projects, with the latest Adeline Hotel full-length Whodunnit making our list of favourites from 2024 and the Kitba’s exceptional self-titled record winning our praise in 2023 (“Proof that art can offer a picture of identity more nuanced than simple labels,” we wrote of the latter. “A deeper understanding reached via an embrace of confusion. Identity as an ongoing thing”). So it is most welcome news the pair have teamed up under the moniker R&D to create improvised, instrumental songs which further delve into the themes they have explored individually. Because while upcoming album I’ll Send You a Sign marks something of a departure from what we might expect from Knishkowy and El-Saleh in terms of style, its thematic concerns feel more like a continuation or deepening. Take the spare, probing single ‘Everything Becomes a Sign’, which mines patience and sensitivity for all of their exploratory potential.

Rival Consoles – Jupiter

We’ve featured a number of tracks from Rival Consoles‘ forthcoming album Landscape from Memory in recent weeks, with tracks like ‘Catherine‘ and ‘Known Shape‘ finding Ryan Lee West working at the intersection of the human and the digital, crafting soundscapes full of euphoria, melancholy and restless motion. With the release approaching via Erased Tapes, West has shared latest single ‘Jupiter’. A song which embodies the album’s spirit in its combination of repetition and variation, its intricate detail and overarching brightness. “At the heart of this piece is a call and response,” as he explains. “The main idea is changing but the response is always the same, this is connected to life and nature. I wanted the music to feel like materials, bending, distorting, shimmering, colourful shards of glass and metal. To me it feels like the sun touching objects with its warmth and power.”

The post Weekly Listening: June 2025 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Specialising in a style of atmospheric alt-rock that’s at once melancholy and anthemic, London outfit Dead Slow Hoot draw on a variety of genres to create something unique.” So we wrote when covering single ‘Take It Or Leave It’ last year, and DSH’s forthcoming new full-length Orbits Intervened takes things even further to become perhaps their most ambitious release to date. A collection of sprawling songs large and detailed enough to carry a range of narratives and thematic concerns, touching on everything from personal heartbreak and grief to the cultural trauma of things like the Magdalene laundries scandal. Lead single ‘Sleeping Before The Big Day’ hints at the release’s nuance and depth, a song full of tension despite its patient rhythm, caught between resistance to change and the desire to surrender to its constant flow.

Orbits Intervened will be released on the 5th June.

eggcorn – Hitler Was a Vegetarian

Last month we introduced Observer Effect, the new album from eggcorn coming soon on Spirit House. “Taking its name from the phenomenon where an observed system is disturbed by the very act of being observed,” we wrote, “[the record] sees songwriter Lara Hoffman explore the ways in which reflecting on one’s life and surroundings can shape our experiences.” After the title track used pop-inflected chamber folk to “bare vulnerabilities and reckon with their implications without sacrificing a certain playfulness,” latest single ‘Hitler Was a Vegetarian’ again finds Hoffman examining her own imperfections with unerring candour. As its title suggests, the song explores the ways in which individuals exist as systems of contradictions, with objectively cruel people still capable of tenderness and vice versa. “I am tender but that doesn’t make me nice,” as Hoffman sings at the climax of the song. “And I’m sorry and I’m sorry and it’s not fair to you.”

Ella Hanshaw – One More Hill

Born in 1934, Ella Hanshaw started playing guitar aged twelve, playing and singing for her family on their farm in Procious, West Virginia. From then until her death in 2020, Hanshaw wrote hundreds of songs, first heartsick ballads inspired by her favourite country singers and later Gospel songs she believed to be sent directly from God. Despite her obvious talents and huge repertoire, Hanshaw’s music was never recorded professionally, or released publicly, at least until now. Gathered from both home and church tape recordings by Hanshaw’s granddaughter, and released by the fine folks at SPINSTER, Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book brings together two distinct collections of her work. Side A features the Gospel songs, while Side B the country ones. Lead single ‘One More Hill’, recorded with Hanshaw’s band the Hallelujah Hill Quartet, opens the collection and is a good example of the its prevailing theme, what the label describe as “love and longing for what we cannot quite touch—not yet, anyway.”

Festiva – Ghosts and Lichens

Carver Arena-Bruce has long released music under the moniker Festiva, with albums like Songs I Don’t Sing for Anyone showing off the Portland, Maine singer and guitarist’s bold, cathartic garage rock style (“If there were a Venn diagram with Sonic Youth in one bubble and CCR in the other, Festiva’s [sound] would be in the middle,” as Arena-Bruce puts it). But the project also has a full-band iteration, with Noah Grenier-Farwell (drums) and Simi Kunin (bass) of Amiright? joining to help realise Festiva’s full noisy potential. Out via Repeating Cloud, new full-length Everything In Moderation shows how powerful this can be, with songs like ‘Ghosts and Lichens’ matching Arena-Bruce’s singular vocal style with a sense of heft and volatility.

Florry – First it was a movie, then it was a book

Philadelphia‘s DIY country superstars Florry have a new record on the way via Dear Life Records. It’s their second effort since bandleader Francie Medosch transformed what was once a solo project into a bona fide folk rock band, and early signs suggest it could see Florry hit yet another level. “A portrait of a ripping band cresting towards the height of their powers,” as the label describe it, “uniquely equipped to capture a wildly loving, barn-burning camcorder clip of a turbulent trip with your best friends, without dipping into nostalgia bait.” Released a couple weeks ago, single ‘First it was a movie, then it was a book’ confirms this hype, a freewheeling country-fried rocker that kicks off the album with limitless energy and dedication to the vision of what Florry means both to Medosch and the community that has formed around her.

First it was a movie, then it was a book
They chopped my life up, put it on tv so I had to take a look
Well that Holly Hunter is so relatable, when she screamed I cried
if I wasn’t feeling so empty baby Id give that movie five out of five

Watch the video directed and edited by Jon Cox below:

Sounds Like… is out on the 23rd May via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Laila Smith – Diorama

Something Dreadful’s Going To Happen, the upcoming release from musician and artist Laila Smith, is more than your average EP. Not only are the songs themselves experimental in their own right, adding avant garde noise sensibilities to what are ostensibly folk arrangements, they are also accompanied by an immersive video game available on Smith’s website. Lead single ‘Diorama’ introduces the project, matching an interactive experience to the song to further its explorations of trauma and the power dynamics which shape us on both personal and societal levels. “I’ve created a digital twin of the physical diorama featured in my album art,” Smith explains, “an explorable environment where fans manipulate a miniature version of me through rooms filled with objects from my personal history.” Taking inspiration from the art style of 90s era internet, the work takes on a strangely retrofuturist vibe, harkening back to a time where the online space felt like fertile ground for a better, more creative future. As Smith puts it: “it’s an attempt to reclaim digital space as somewhere strange and sacred rather than optimized and consumable.”

‘Diorama’ is out now via streaming services.

Rival Consoles – Known Shape

“Might be the project’s most impressive [record] to date, focusing in on small details while retaining the grand sweeps of melancholy and euphoria too.” So we wrote of Landscape from Memory, the upcoming from Rival Consoles on Erased Tapes. The release sees Ryan Lee West delve into what he calls “a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets,” building from the flashes of memory and inspiration found within. Embodying the spirit of the release, latest single ‘Known Shape’ shows how Rival Consoles retains a sense of humanity within its digital sound. “I’ve always been obsessed by controls on machines because they produce beautiful sounds and they have their own rhythms,” West explains. “The drums are made from rotating switches and the synths are set in motion by invisible mechanical rhythms. Machines have a special connection to the human spirit, which is both good and bad but above all restless. There is a constant searching in ‘Known Shape’ for some kind of answer or emotion.”

Sally Anne Morgan – I Saw a Heron

The music of North Carolina artist and naturalist Sally Anne Morgan is inextricable from the landscape in which she creates it. Her blend of traditional instrumentation and more modern composition is an exploration of the people, places and nature that surround her home at the edge of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest. Morgan’s forthcoming record, Second Circle The Horizon, is a direct example, an attempt to translate both the rhythm and randomness of the natural world into a language more musical. “I wanted to capture the feeling of walking outside and encountering organic nature sounds,” she describes, “some with patterns, some with a randomness that also verges on its own kind of pattern.” Our first taste is ‘I Saw a Heron’, a piece built of fiddle, violin and piano that feels as fresh and lush as a spring morning walk through a sunlit valley.

Slow Mass – Freeze Frame

Next month sees the release of Low On Foot, the new album from Slow Mass on Landland Corportage. Their first since 2018, the record finds the Chicago outfit bigger and bolder than ever, their line-up increasing to six members (and subsequently seven after recording) and their sound pushing in all directions. Single ‘Freeze Frame’ bears the fruits of this evolution, a sound at once weightier than anything they released previously yet also more tender and heartfelt. Because Slow Mass haven’t merely taken their work down one specific road but added depth to everything, meaning their current iteration can be heavier and more delicate all at once. The juxtaposition is fitting for ‘Freeze Frame’, a song all about the tension between who you are and who you might have been, holding space for those desires to change as a person while learning to embrace one’s own identity.

Watch

Low On Foot is out on the 16th May via Landland Colportage and you can pre-order it now.

Symbol Soup – Miniatures

Back in 2023 Symbol Soup released full-length Slow Puncture via Sad Club Records, an album “brought to life with a decidedly American aesthetic, following a lineage rising in the 90s from songwriters like Mark Linkous and persisting through a myriad of contemporaries,” as we described in our review, “but one which draws parallels between the US and Rea’s hometown of Milton Keynes. A city with a short history inside a country with a long one, designed purely for modern living and possessing the strange balance between potential and hollowness of any ahistorical space.” New single ‘Miniatures’ is again concerned with place and a person’s identity within it, specifically how overly familiar surroundings can come to make a life seem rote and insignificant. But with Symbol Soup’s signature blend of melancholy and warmth, the song manages to reposition such feelings into something like relief. Perhaps being small isn’t the worst thing in the world?

Watch the video by Hello Mary below:

‘Miniatures’ is out now via Sad Club Records and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: April 2025 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Now Rival Consoles is back with Landscape from Memory, a brand new full-length due to be released this summer by Erased Tapes, and the sense of evolution continues. The record developed slowly, following an uncharacteristic dormant period for the usually prolific artist. But perhaps that period of stasis was just what was needed, because the end result might be the project’s most impressive to date, focusing in on small details while retaining the grand sweeps of melancholy and euphoria too. This is due in part to the process of its creation, which saw West dive into ” a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets,” breathing life into the flashes of potential he discovered in primordial shards of melody. “There is a kind of strange beauty to [the process],” he describes, “because it involves the past, present and future in a very strong way.”

Lead single ‘Catherine’ illustrates this perfectly. Ostensibly a dance track, but suffused with far more nuance and emotion, the song is dedicated to his partner, and sounds more like the lonely memory of a dancefloor than a sweaty, packed one. “It’s extremely open, just like a naked melody on drums, so exposed as an idea,” West explains. “I think because she was so excited by it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m excited too, actually, I just didn’t realize.”

The post Rival Consoles – Catherine appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Adeline Hotel – Whodunnit

Ruination Record Co.

“There’s always a strange combination of continuity and change within a new album from Adeline Hotel. Each record building upon what came before it while often in some respects also turning away to chart new ground. As though the project exists as a kind of world of its own, and the function of each release is to bring us a view of a different corner. Adeline Hotel as a vast space we’re discovering album by album, song by song, with Dan Knishkowy not so much engineering the experience as leading the way. This exploratory spirit is central to Whodunnit […] an album following a tradition which lists the likes of Gillian Welch, Neil Young and Van Morrison among its practitioners. Songs as a form of stream of consciousness, not only in terms of lyrics but the very sound itself. The sense of having tapped into some wellspring of movement or momentum and choosing to lean into the flow.” [Review]

Advance Base – Horrible Occurrences

Run For Cover / Orindal Records

“For while the setting is entirely imaginary, the narratives and characters owe much to real life. Indeed the killer [of ‘The Year I Lived in Richmond’] is inspired by an analogous figure who stalked a place Advance Base‘s Own Ashworth once called home, fictionalised to create some sense of distance and decency. If Horrible Occurrences can be distilled into one reductive image, then that is perhaps the most enlightening. A receptacle into which bad memories and old stories can be poured. A small town diorama in which they can play out again, change shapes, take on lives of their own. One we might approach and watch over along with Ashworth, feeling tall from that perspective, relatively safe in the top-down view.” [Review]

Anne Malin – Strange Power!

Dear Life Records

Released in tandem book-length poem What Floods under the name AM Ringwalt, Anne Malin‘s Strange Power! is an album which explores “how nature and its inherent motion might possess the key to the process of healing in the aftermath of trauma and loss,” as we wrote earlier in the year. Something which possesses a palpable momentum yet no clear conclusion. In other hands, this lack of answers or endings might be held up as the tragic farce of existence, but here is positioned more like an opportunity. To continue asking questions both of yourself and your surroundings, as though the act of interrogation is its own strange power. A sign of a faith in something human and sublime.

Being Dead – EELS

Bayonet Records

“If you thought [previous release] When Horses Would Run was inventive, then just wait until you hear what is coming next. Because the new Being Dead full-length EELS […] takes everything that made its predecessor special and pushes it further. Travelling to Los Angeles for a fortnight of writing and recording with John Congleton, the pair pushed themselves to embrace the singular spirit of their work. The result is a record that’s more intense, more raucous and decidedly darker than anything which has come before, without sacrificing that mischievous persona.” [Review]

Ben Seretan – Allora

Tiny Engines

Described by Ben Seretan as his “insane Italy record,” Allora represents a snapshot from a very specific time and place. Or rather it would, should ‘snapshot’ come anywhere close to describing the scale, heft and sheer abundance of moving parts on show. Seretan and his band were due to play a wedding at the tail end of “a wonderful but lightly disastrous tour” of Europe during the summer of 2019, only for rain to half play and leave them in the lurch. But rather than waste the curious mix of energy and exhaustion that sets in at the end of a tour, they decided to make an album instead. A three-day stint at a farmhouse in the hills overlooking Venice with renowned mixing engineer, producer, musician Matt Bordin was arranged. A brief moment where a plethora of emotions were processed and purged through joyful noise. The result is unashamedly maximalist, entirely heartfelt, and in possession of that lightning-in-a-bottle feel that suggests it could never have materialised anywhere else. Catharsis has long been a key thread of Ben Seretan’s work, but rarely has it gone quite so hard.

The Big Easy – (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As the View

Trash Casual Records

“It’s notable that The Big Easy’s latest album, (It’s No Secret) The Truth As Bad As The View, is the first to feature Berthomieux’s image on the cover. The first symbol on a record that looks to grapple with exactly how and why a person of colour might be made to feel an interloper within certain artistic circles. Berthomieux cites a James Baldwin statement as a key to realigning his perspective. ‘To be a Negro in this country,’ Baldwin wrote, ‘and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time.’ Suddenly what had for so long seemed like a personal hang-up or imposter syndrome was revealed to be an intrinsic part of the Black experience, and to connect his own emotions with a historic struggle proved liberating. Thus the album became an exercise in owning his identity and finally voicing those things kept buried for so long. ‘It’s No Secret is kind of like a journal,’ as Berthomieux concludes, ‘a place where I can express the things that I haven’t been able to say out loud’.” [Review]

Brown Horse – Reservoir

Loose Music

“Call it distraction, call it despair / No matter what you call it you can feel it when it’s there.” These lines from the track ‘Bloodstain’ encapsulate the presiding mood of Brown Horse’s Reservoir. A sense of unease which permeates their alt-country style like something “drifted on the low tide,” as the song continues. Something that’s now “hell bent for to stay.” This disquiet is evoked not only in images of stark estuary mudflats and cold fields but also polycotton shirts and soulless expanses of megastores. In the nostalgic melancholy of opener ‘Stealing Horses’, or the Molina-esque lyricism of songs like ‘Sunfisher’ and ‘Outtakes’ with their burning houses, hummingbird hearts and singing birds. And like all the best Gothic atmosphere, it is not entirely clear whether the sensation is a haunting from some ancient thing or a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Cara Beth Satalino – Little Green

Worried Songs

“The success of Little Green is in no small part a result of the nuanced nature of Cara Beth Satalino’s approach. Early on you come to appreciate her uncanny ability to combine deep soul-searching with offhand observations and gentle humour, inventive imagery and smart turns of phrase creating something rich and full of life despite the surrounding turmoil. [A record] soft and fragile as a little green shoot but with a spark of energy too, a desire to keep on. It might be too dark to see what is in front of you, but the earth is still turning and the bright star is still burning. There is time yet to grow towards the light.” [Review]

Cassandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer

Dead Oceans

Cassandra Jenkins intended to step away from music after her 2021 album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, only for the album to resonant so deeply with audiences she found herself newly (and perhaps reluctantly) energised, pulled back towards the urge to create. My Light, My Destroyer is what emerged a few years later, a record which not so much builds upon its predecessor as explodes out in every direction. Sophistipop, jazz and New Age elements lift Jenkins’s indie rock sound to almost orchestral territory, while layers of found sounds and field recordings anchor the otherwise celestial style in the lived-in world. This duality between the grounded and the elevated is typical of the tone, where encroaching darkness is matched by a curiosity and attentiveness to wonder. The world is beautiful, the world is burning, and both of these facts are made more urgent by the other.

The Chairman Dances – Evening Song

Self-Released

“Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship,” we wrote back in September. “A seminarian and a drummer mutually enamoured with one another, caught in the heady space of attraction and mystery, hungry to learn everything there is to know about the other.” Working from this point of intersection, Eric Krewson and co. bring the pair of characters to life, providing small glimpses into moments both special and seemingly mundane to achieve a strikingly intimate sense of humanity. As with much of The Chairman Dances’ catalogue, the beauty is in the detail. The hollow knock of shoes, the wail of an oven’s timer, the catch of a lock. Small confessions shared between two people daring to allow their lives to become enmeshed.

The Dead Tongues – Body of Light / I Am a Cloud

Psychic Hotline

Not content with releasing just one record this year, Ryan Gustafson’s The Dead Tongues put out two simultaneously. The albums, published as standalone digital releases but brought together in a double LP, display both aspects of the Asheville, North Carolina songwriter’s oeuvre. I Am A Cloud is an exercise is meandering cosmic Americana, what Gustafson calls “a fever dream of song and spoken-word about the toggle between identity and ephemerality,” while Body of Light sees things solidify into discrete folk rock songs. Joined by a stellar cast of collaborators and a sense of improvisational freedom, it’s the most expensive and ambitious Dead Tongues release to date.

Deerlady – Greatest Hits

Self-Released

Described as “a collection of songs about intimacy,” Greatest Hits sees Mali Obomsawin and Magdalena Abrego unite as Deerlady to conjure soundscapes simultaneously stark, tender and thunderous. Both Obomsawin and Abrego have backgrounds in jazz, and though some of the genre’s fluidity carries through, the Deerlady project exists outside of that sphere and the expectations it carries. Rather, Greatest Hits offers an indie rock style free to be more elemental and raw, one attuned to ideas of softness and hope within a hostile and violent world. As if in the face of colonial cruelty, sound might fill the gaps where words cannot suffice. “Brick and concrete / two hundred thousand years buried beneath / while the stars witnessed the unholy,” as Obomsawin, who is from the Abenaki First Nation at Odanak, sings on ‘Masterpieces’. “Well I take it in / I wrestle with the language to begin / I didn’t come to make a speech, I came to live.”

Desert Liminal – Black Ocean

Whited Sepulchre Records

“Released in 2021, Desert Liminal‘s Glass Fate found the Chicago band “settling into a higher form,” as we put it at the time, with violinist and noise artist Mallory Linehan (AKA Chelsea Bridge) joining Sarah Jane Quillin and Rob Logan to elevate their trademark dreamy aesthetic. [Black Ocean] in many ways represents a continuation of this process. With the outfit now cemented as a trio, Linehan joins Quillin as a songwriter and vocalist, grounding the nascent sense of collaboration and connection which emerged on Glass Fate as a core facet of Desert Liminal. A development which is thematically resonant too, the record exploring ways in which death can be faced communally, and grief transmuted into something affirming and meaningful. Chicago’s DIY scene carried Quillin through the worst experiences, and Black Ocean looks to distil this experience into its purest form. The resulting songs often seem like love letters to the people in these communities. Those figures who stood next to you through the best and worst of times.” [Review]

Distant Reader – Place of Words Now Gone

Lily Tapes & Discs

“No news in weeks from outside town,” announces Emmerich Anklam at the beginning of the latest Distant Reader album, Place of Words Now Gone, thrusting the listener into a world suddenly quiet along with his bewildered characters. “Who left me in the center of this desolation?” one such person asks, “Who’s hearing me talk? Does it matter at all? Is anyone still out there? And who can tell the difference between the end and the beginning?” The record took seed in Anklam’s brain during long train rides through the fabled American landscape, and although a clear work of fiction, it’s hard not to see reality in the community it describes—abandoned by those beyond it’s boundaries, succumbing to helplessness as they lose what little agency were ever afforded them. A portrait of an isolated and dislocated America where those left behind are left to struggle and mourn as a deepening silence floods the places they call home. “And everybody she knows goes quiet trying to forget about the ways they could diminish still,” as Emmerich sings on ‘From High Remove’, “the spiral closing in around all of them. Words vanish fold in on themselves, questions halved quartered eighthed. Absence of sound infects all who feel it. Tones, phrases returning to the ether.”

Emily Hines – These Days

Self-Released

“I don’t know about you, but I’m holding out hope.” So sings Emily Hines on ‘UFO’, a single which embodies the tone of her full-length These Days. As warm and soft as a blanket to wrap around yourself in the cold winter months, but with a sharp pang of something else too, a bittersweet bite more potent than the frost at the window. The entire album is an understated gem, full of quiet and wistful songs about difficult relationships, questions unanswered or unanswerable, hoping for something more. On ‘UFO’ this ranges from a desire to know the truth about the Roswell landings to wishing for the sublime reckoning of the Second Coming. But for all of its outlandish subject matter, the song, like These Days as a whole, is entirely straight with its underlying sentiment. There is still hope that wrongs can be righted, Hines insists. Things can change for the better.

Enumclaw – Home in Another Life

Run For Cover Records

Ever wondered what might happen if you were to cross the beams of don’t-give-a-shit slacker rock and confessional, emotionally intense emo? Home in Another Life, the latest album from Tacoma’s Enumclaw, is here to provide an answer. The record is unafraid of the largest themes, lead Aramis Johnson wrestles with everything from God, illness and death to self-doubt, relationships and sex, but does so with a sense of energy and swagger. As though faced with the tangle of life’s difficulties, Enumclaw make the conscious decision to charge headlong forwards, conscious of every possible branch and thorn but moving too purposefully to become ensnared in any one spot. Whether it be the denial of a difficult diagnosis in ‘Not Just Yet’ or the internalised shame of ‘I Still Feel Bad About Masturbation’, Home in Another Life takes emotions and experiences which so often feel unspeakable and shouts them aloud in an act of agency.

The Felice Brothers – Valley of Abandoned Songs

Million Stars / 15 Passenger

Since their inception in 2006, The Felice Brothers have established themselves as one of the premier acts of contemporary US folk rock, building a catalogue of urgent narratives and strange visions with enough depth to stand alongside their literary influences. “Poems and short stories packed with clever references and wry turns of phrase” as we wrote of 2021’s From Dreams to Dust. “A confrontation of the grim realities of our moment that nevertheless celebrates the fact of being alive.” As the title suggests, Valley of Abandoned Songs is a collection of tracks written throughout the project which never quite made it onto a record, but were nevertheless strong enough to convince Conor Oberst, no less, to set up a brand new label just to release them into the world. Single ‘Flowers By The Roadside’ is the perfect example of their ability to conjure entire lives and histories in the shortest of spaces.

Are you
High as Mr Albert was
When he drove the cross town bus
Straight into the sky
I’m just sitting in these flowers by the roadside
I’m not trying to flag a ride
Just happy watching the wide world go by

The Fourth Wall – Return Forever

DevilDuck Records

Kickstarted by a family story of a relative who left a child behind when emigrating to the United States, Return Forever by The Fourth Wall is “an album which,” as we put it in our review, “combs through the contradictions of the immigrant experience in order to voice feelings otherwise impossible to convey.” Delivered via a weighty brand of indie rock, the mood ranges from anger and confusion to catharsis and joy, and the result, as we continued, is “a mixture of hope, denial and genuine love which not only subverts expectations but confounds any attempt to properly reassess. As though some decisions can be so complicated, their impacts so profound, that the very physics of emotions are bent beyond their own laws.”

Gabriel Birnbaum – Patron Saint of Tireless Losers

Western Vinyl

“Gabriel Birnbaum has become increasingly interested in music’s narrative potential, and Patron Saint [of Tireless Losers] finds him at his most confident to date,” we wrote in June. An album where Birnbaum again evolves his sound and writing to present “vignettes which occupy the knife-edge between specificity and ambiguity, rewarding the return listener with layers of wry humour and naked human emotion.” Birnbaum introduces a diverse array of characters—young and old, male and female, lonely and in the throes of love—all troubled by the gap between their own views of the world and the evitable dawning reality. As though every person, be they nervous concert-goer or overeager prepper ostensibly ready for the end times, is at some point destined to realise the true, unforgiving nature of mortal existence.

h. pruz – No Glory

Mtn Laurel Recording Co.

Many albums exists within the giddy period of new beginnings, their creators emerging from a tumultuous period of suffering or drastic change with an almost epiphanic perspective. The bad thing is in the past now, life can show its light. But while h. pruz‘s latest album No Glory focuses its gaze on a variety of pivotal moments from the life of Hannah Pruzinsky—moments they withstood, survived, emerged from—and goes as far as to imagine the perfect life ahead, it refuses the temptation to bask in the transient warmth of such possibility. As though to present the experience of a newly hopeful present as something unmarked by regret or doubt is to fail to fully inhabit its complexities. “I keep seeing change,” as Pruzunsky sings on ‘I Keep Changing’. “Peel away the borders / Of things with weight like copper / Thought it was gold / Til it turned green / In the rain.”

Haley Heynderickx – Seed of a Seed

Mama Bird Recording Co.

In 2018, Haley Heynderickx released I Need To Start a Garden, an album “all about growth and the hope of new beginnings” we wrote, yet one which refused to “shy away from the necessary hard work that makes such growth possible.” Follow-up Seed of a Seed emerges from this process of emotional cultivation, Heynderickx learning how to continue and improve upon the previous album’s progress while coming to understand such things are rarely linear and never complete. Opening tracks ‘Gemini’ and ‘Foxglove’ are marked by a sense of urgency, seized by the haste of new growth, though by the second half the tempo levels out into something slower and more complex. A host of musicians support the trademark finger-picked style, creating a layered thicket, the Haley Heynderickx sound now a rich polyculture diverse and hardy enough to face whatever life might throw at it next.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Rework Series)

Erased Tapes

In 2022, Hatis Noit released Aura, a full-length album “which draws from the vast array of Noit’s influences from Japanese classical music Gagaku and operatic performers to Bulgarian and Gregorian chanting,” we wrote previously, “not to mention avant-garde experimentalists and pop vocal styles.” Aura has had a new lease of life in subsequent years, with a series of reworkings made in collaboration with an equally diverse set of artists. After the likes of William Basinski and Matthew Herbert in 2023, this year saw Noit enlist the talents of Laraaji, Preservation and Armand Hammer to push the already kaleidoscopic sound even further.

Holland Andrews – Answers

LEITER

“Back in 2021, Brooklyn-based composer, producer, vocalist, and clarinetist Holland Andrews released Wordless, the first of a series of EPs under their own name (having previously recorded as Like A Villain). Released with label LEITER, the record introduced a distinctively transportive sound. Led by voice and clarinet and processed through a variety of electronics, the compositions offered soundscapes in which the listener might lose themselves. Rich tapestries of colour and texture crafted with an almost cinematic attention to detail. Subsequent EPs Forgettings and Doubtless furthered the scope and intention of the style, exploring themes of healing and transcendence as Andrews’s genre-bending sensibilities solidified into a style of their own […] Now Holland Andrews has returned with Answers, the fourth and final EP of the series which feels like both the clearest realisation of their creative ideals and a continued, active resistance against genre conventions.” [Review]

Hour – Ease the Work

Dear Life Records

With a studio’s worth of equipment in tow, the ensemble Hour took a ferry to Peaks Island, Maine out of season, and spent a week holed up together in an old theatre to record their latest album, Ease the Work. The project boasts a diverse cast of musicians—lead Michael Cormier O’Leary (electric guitar, classical guitar, percussion) joined by Jason Calhoun (synth), Em Downing (violin), Matt Fox (viola), Elisabeth Fuchsia (violin) Peter Gill (bass), Lucas Knapp (radio effects, field recordings, piano), Evan McGonagill (cello), Peter McLaughlin (drums, percussion), Keith J. Nelson (bass clarinet, clarinet), Erika Nininger (piano, rhodes) and Abi Reimold (electric guitar)—each bringing their own instincts and sensibilities to the project’s lush instrumental arrangements. The intimacy of the recording process allowed each separate contribution to coalesce into harmony. “Challenging any clear distinction between composition and improvisation,” as we wrote earlier in the year, the resulting record “performs the same small miracle of the previous records, presenting the everyday in all its joy and melancholy, comfort and strangeness.”

I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack

A24 Music

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with the imaginary one,” Svetlana Boym wrote in her 2001 book, The Future of Nostalgia. “In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland.” The warning is explored in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, a film with a decidedly complex relationship with nostalgia. It can be something to wrap yourself in, bond over, shelter beneath, yet with this retreat comes the risk of a detrimental stasis, where fondness for the past comes to eat up the present. The interrogation is furthered by the film’s soundtrack, where the likes of Caroline Polachek, Florist, Frances Quinlan, Sadurn and King Women tap into the unapologetically sentimental nineties aesthetic. But it is the very first track that is perhaps the most thematically resonant. Yeule‘s cover of ‘Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl’ is so distorted by glitchy imperfections it becomes something of a Baudrillardian simulacrum. A memory denatured by overhandling, unpegged from reality, a figment of the imagination which has come to replace the real.

Jahnah Camille – i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl

Winspear

“The songs offer a picture of late adolescence in all of its bittersweet nuance, its introspective contemplation matched only by its bold confessional attitude.” That’s how we described i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, the debut EP of Birmingham, Alabama-based songwriter and musician  Jahnah Camille earlier this year. The release reaches for a number of genres with real confidence, be it the nineties alt-rock swagger of ‘flesh’ or the country twang of ‘roadkill’. “[But it is] the lyrics which really see the artist stand apart,” we continued. “Because Camille has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness, offering songs entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.”

Jess Ribeiro – Summer of Love

Poison City Records

Written amid a period of intense instability, Summer of Love finds Jess Ribeiro negotiating the liminal space between hope and reality, confronting the past and possible futures alongside the present moment to find a way towards healing. Ribeiro chose to lean into the turmoil during the recording process, undeterred by the fact collaborators could only visit individually thanks to the pandemic restrictions, and many never made it to the studio at all. Yet together with Nick Huggins, she nonetheless enlisted the talents of Jim White (drums), Darcy McNulty (saxophone), Leah Senior (keys), James Seymour (bass), Davie Mudie (percussion) and Carrie Webster (violin and viola), guiding each musician according to the release’s spirit. The result is improvised and exploratory yet bound by the same sense of longing. That will to work through tumultuous times towards something more solid. The hope that chaos might resolve itself into a more hospitable state.

Josaleigh Pollett – In The Garden, By The Weeds

Self-Released

“An excavation of the present which inevitably tends pastward, tracing a presiding cynicism back to its roots in search of a cause.” That’s how we described Josaleigh Pollett‘s third album In The Garden, By The Weeds. At first, the imagery of the title resonates on a surface level, the Salt Lake City songwriter surveying the ecosystem of their life, assessing which parts to nurture, which to pluck or prune. But spend a minute with this collection of stark and glitchy songs and it becomes clear things are operating on a deeper level. For Pollett not only gives the weeds their due but the subterranean conditions too. Those places dark and elemental we so often pretend have no relation to us higher beings. Places perhaps inside of our lives or our selves we must reach down into if we are to make any real progress in cultivating the kind of environment we want to live in. Even if it means getting our hands dirty, scrunching our eyes and grasping blind.

Joy Guidry – AMEN

Whited Sepulchre Records

“In AMEN,” explained Joy Guidry of their most recent album, “there is a lot experimentation with different forms of Black American music. I wanted to lean heavily on my Texas, Louisiana and Creole roots in this project. There were many days spent with my ancestors during the writing of this album and I’m eternally grateful for the music they sang to me during our time together.” The record saw the basoonist and composer develop their sound with the newly prominent influence of gospel and spiritual jazz, combining the sensibilities of church music with jazz invention to create something fundamentally devotional. “The result is at once communal and singular,” as we put it in our review. “Joy Guidry as realised in their most complete form to date.”

K. Freund – Trash Can Lamb

Soda Gong

We’ve been following the work of Akron, Ohio’s Keith Freund for the better part of two decades, originally with Trouble Books, then as one half of the experimental/neoclassical duo Lejsovka & Freund, and more recently with Lemon Quartet and Aqueduct Ensemble. Following 2022’s Hunter on the Wing, Trash Can Lamb is Freund’s latest release under his own name, and offers another exercise in minimal piano, degraded samples and an array of tactile electronics. It’s the neoclassical equivalent of the folk art eccentric, spinning singular homebrew beauty from a treehouse studio filled with strange gadgets and devices, at far remove from the polish and pretension of the auditorium, yet somehow deeper for it. Trash Can Lamb walks it own path straight to the heart of things, small moments and sensations that you couldn’t describe with words if you tried.

Kali Malone – All Life Long

Ideologic Organ

“Manages to suggest both academic rigour and unburdened instinct, but ultimately transcends any focus on its intentions as the listener becomes immersed in the soundscape. Some hymn or lament, latent with the suggestion of the sublime, be it total dread or transcendence, silence or all-encompassing sound.” So we wrote of Living Torch by Kali Malone back in 2022, though the description could be extended to much of the Stockholm-based composer’s work. Written for pipe organ, choir and brass quintet, latest release All Life Long possesses all the same clarity and depth, breathing new life into classical techniques to create something at once intimate and exalted. Not holy music, per say, but music which operates according to the same ends. Aiming to evoke those sensations felt in the face of things far greater than us, more mysterious, yet surrounding us all the same.

Keanu Nelson – Wilurarrakutu

Mississippi Records

Primarily a poet in his home of Papunya, northwest of Alice Springs, Keanu Nelson was inspired to start singing his work after meeting producer Yuta Matsumura in the local arts centre. The result is Wilurarrakutu, an album first released on Altered States Tapes last year, but put out to a wider audience back in August by Mississippi Records. With Casio beats programmed by Matsumura as support, Nelson delivers deeply personal poetry on themes of loneliness and family, home and loss, in both Papunya Luritja and English. Nelson incorporates reggae and gospel influences into a sound which emerges from an electronic sonic lineage that trails back to the likes of Suicide and Francis Bebey but represents its own singular style. One which aches with a sense of longing, the relative simplicity of the arrangements allowing the emotional depth of Nelson’s poetry to sit front and centre, blurring the classic and the contemporary into something genuinely moving.

Lia Kohl – Normal Sounds

Moon Glyph

“Able to evoke existence in all of its magic and mundanity.” That’s how we described the work of Chicago-based cellist, composer and multidisciplinary artist Lia Kohl back in July, describing her album Normal Sounds as “at once normal and very much not, or else it is extraordinarily normal—with Kohl turning her attention to the acoustics of everyday living and presenting them back to the listener as something as something new.” Existing somewhere between music and sound art, the record uses synths and cello (as well as occasional flute and electronics from Ka Baird and sax from Patrick Shiroishi) to accentuate field recordings of human-made sounds, reflecting our own world back to us in a new light. Here the incidental is elevated, each song a cacophony crafted from the sounds we so often ignore or phase out. Kohl isn’t so much crafting a soundscape for us to hear as rewiring our brains so that our attention might be heightened. What we encounter in such a state is sometimes playful, sometimes strange, occasionally unnerving and melancholic in the way the slow passage of life always is. The human world in granular detail. What it sounds like to live here and now.

Lindsay Reamer – Natural Science

Dear Life Records

“[Songs which] not only represent a study of a specific time and place—capturing a snapshot of environments both natural and human and the porous border between the two—but also a report on how it feels to exist within that period. As though Lindsay Reamer serves as our guide through contemporary America as she knows it. A squeezed no-man’s land between the past and the future. A place where great beauty and banality sit side by side, where old choices drag unforeseen consequences towards us and yet the smallest details still seem to hold life in all of its inscrutable charm.” [Review]

Little Kid – A Million Easy Payments

Orindal Records

“[The] ability to vary the focal length of its perspective so gracefully is a signature of A Million Easy Payments. “The urgency in Kenny Boothby’s voice matches the stakes of his lyrics,” writes Dan Wriggins in the liner notes [of Little Kid‘s latest album], “epic ballads and reveries that come at life from all angles and exposures, driving at and a little over the limits of self-reflection.” The sense of an artist never quite satisfied with the scene they have captured, always looking to widen the lens to better represent the truth before them, or else zoom in closer in search of the missing detail which might click everything else into place. Call it a search for meaning, or even God Himself. In other hands, songs reaching for such things with the expansive style of Dylan and Welch at their most ambitious might feel like novelty or pastiche. But in this context it seems the only logical outcome for Little Kid’s specific way of working.” [Review]

Lollise – i hit the water

Switch Hit Records

“Hailing from Francistown in Botswana and now based in New York, Lollise is an artist who draws from the entirety of her musical history when crafting her songs. Hence the sound of her debut full-length I hit the water owes a debt to the styles which soundtracked her childhood and early years—including Setswana and Kalanga folk songs, South African electronic bubblegum and kwaito from the eighties and nineties, Congolese soukous and Zimbabwean sungura—as well as genres like Afrobeat, art-pop and new wave which she immersed herself in after moving to the US. What results is a sound capable of evoking the future and past simultaneously, where traditional styles are repurposed to open new directions, and the line between history and imagination blurs into something entirely new.” [Review]

Mary Ocher – Your Guide to Revolution

Underground Institute

“To say Mary Ocher’s latest album Your Guide to Revolution is ambitious in its intentions is to risk understatement. A kaleidoscopic and politically charged collection of songs which draws on Ocher’s childhood (born in Moscow to Jewish-Ukrainian parents before emigrating to Tel Aviv during the Gulf War) as a way into wider themes of resistance and civil disobedience. A huge array of styles and influences are utilised across the record, both to evoke the gamut of emotions triggered within the contemporary struggle and to ground the release within a wider history of such subversive art. A central part of the album is a series of three tracks which rework pieces by harpist Dorothy Ashby based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyyam, a triptych of songs which Ocher has collected into a short film which echoes The Color of Pomegranates by Sergei Parajanov.” [Review]

Merce Lemon – Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wilds

Darling Recordings

“A collection of nine songs with dirt under their fingernails, equal parts wild and vulnerable as they reckon with the changing tides of love in all its guises […] Merce Lemon’s songwriting is often gentle, careful and sincere ruminations on love and solitude, but this underlying ferality is perhaps the record’s biggest strength, and the most obvious step forward from Moonth. A reminder the soft animal can still bear its teeth, a kind of wildness that turns heartfelt, mid-tempo folk rock songs into blown-out anthems, building towards crescendos of wailing guitar and pure feeling.” [Review]

Minor Moon – The Light Up Waltz

Ruination Record Co.

Minor Moon‘s latest album The Light-Up Waltz is set within “speculative world, where civilisation has collapsed and the characters are made to exist in the aftermath,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “But far from some desolate landscape of grim suffering, this post-civilisation society is one coloured by the invention and playfulness of its inhabitants. As though steely determination can only be maintained with a suitable accompaniment of joy.” This is a collection of songs working under such a logic, finding its characters proactive in their search for meaning, and perhaps finding it through that very mindset. “To me,” as lead Sam Cantor puts it, “the antidote to fatalistic disillusionment is a kind of complicated dance with dread, hope and joy.”

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks

Anti- Records

It’s fair to say MJ Lenderman has come a long way since we shared ‘Gentleman Jack’ from his 2021 album, Ghost of Your Guitar Solo. Through his what we’ve described previously as “masterful knack for combining details small and absurd into something which feels like life as it’s lived on the ground,” the last coulpe of years has seen Lenderman take the leap into the indie stratosphere, and latest album Manning Fireworks makes good on this acclaim without sacrificing the sensibilities which got him there in the first place. Often wacky yet always unabashedly earnest, these are songs of a different sort of American mythology. Colourful, chintzy, most likely temporary. A place of waterparks and McDonalds lots. Pocket Bibles, drunk drivers, Disney Pixar deleted scenes. A place inhabited by people who were once babies and now jerks. People like you and me.

Mol Sullivan – GOOSE

Self-Released

A self-described “long exposure photograph” charting growth both artistic and personal, Mol Sullivan‘s GOOSE serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change. With songs written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety, the album opens with Sullivan “set deep in those early days of a new beginning,” as we wrote, “where everything feels possible yet tenuous and a little too vivid to bear,” but does not stay constrained to the present moment. Instead, we find an artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life. An artist in dialogue with themselves, teasing out those fundamental things which exist beyond what happens to us within any given moment, and thus repositioning change as a positive force we might harness to become ourselves more fully.

mui zyu – nothing or something to die for / cantonese tasting menu EP

Father/Daughter Records

Last year’s Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century saw Hong Kong British artist mui zyu delve deep within themselves in search of a better understanding of their own identity. The songs mapped a vast labyrinth of history and personal experience and located the elusive truth not locked in some remote central chamber but rather via the process itself. But if the introspective survey of Rotten Bun charted the complex contours of its own small world, follow up nothing or something to die for flips its gaze outwards to take on a far bigger challenge—the chaotic, conflicted place we call home. Here human society is painted as an overwhelming and fundamentally lonely place, where an omnipresent technological connection belies the isolation at its core. Floating over this absurd space, mui zyu looks for the points where the veil between us is the thinnest, hoping a better existence might be possible while refusing to ignore evidence to the contrary. There might be nothing, there might be something to die for, or perhaps both of these things can be true at once.

Nap Eyes – The Neon Gate

Paradise of Bachelors

Through a string of ambitious, philosophical and playful albums, Halifax outfit Nap Eyes have established themselves as one of the most inventive, thematically interesting bands in contemporary indie rock. Even by their standards, The Neon Gate pushes the envelope on what songs can be and explore. Fans will recognise Nigel Chapman’s distinctively deadpan vocals, but the Nap Eyes sound has expanded in various directions, shapeshifting between tracks and unafraid of the abstract and improvised. Weird tangents are followed, eldritch stories are told, what rules there were are broken. The result is to witness something familiar transmogrify, metastasise, expand and contract before your eyes, the recognisable slowly twisted strange into a new, surreal landscape. A style inspired, at least in part, by the William Butler Yeats poem ‘I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart’s Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness’. A poem which is adapted as a song near the end of the album:

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind’s eye.

Prostitute – Attempted Martyr

Self-Released

The past year has been desperate, dizzying and ferociously cruel for many, and no release captured this reality better than Attempted Martyr by Prostitute. Described as being “written and recorded under duress of a world in turmoil” and “dedicated to Lebanon, from Dearborn with love,” the album sits somewhere between noise rock, post-punk and jazz. A collection of songs twisted tight with intensity, always threatening to spin out of control, fired by the depthless fury of grief and somehow managing an air of plaintive sorrow too. Beneath the delivery’s bark and bite lies a deceptively diverse range of moods and emotions—from the mournful opening title track and spittle-flecked defiance of ‘Judge’ to poetic meditations on justice and resistance and even a certain wry humour (Prostitute one-up fellow Michigan punks Protomartyr by devoting an entire song to celebrity attorney Joumana Kayrouz). A timely reminder of the fertile relationship between anger and compassion, and a scream into the face of a world gone numb.

Rosali – Bite Down

Merge Records

“Help me, darling, I can’t seem to bite down on it / I can’t seem to feel what’s real anymore.” So opens the title track of Rosali‘s Bite Down, giving voice to a sentiment which underpins the entire album. But this is not a record of desperate pleas and drifting disconnection, rather the antidote to such things. As though having been touched by these emotions, Rosali chose to be proactive, confronting life’s ups and downs with a newfound defiance, determined to feel reality in all its forms. The title refers to “something more extreme than leaning in,” as Rosali told Mariana Timony for Bandcamp. “I’m taking a bite. I’m accepting it. I’m chewing it.” Again recorded with the David Nance Band to blur the line between solo and group effort, the resulting album effortlessly straddles folk and classic rock styles and builds upon everything which made 2021’s No Medium so special.

Roswit – Eternal Living

Mono Tapes

The debut album from self-described “olde punks” Roswit has one foot in classic Pacific Northwest indie pop and another across the ocean in a Flying Nun Records style jangle, with some wiry, stripped-back punk thrown in for good measure. From infectious opener ‘Grape’s Song’, which calls to mind fellow Vancouverites The Courtney’s, to the sleeves-rolled-up scrappiness of ‘King’s Song’, every song is packed with a sense of DIY fun. And to top it all there’s a throwback vibe, not to bygone decades but right back to the Middle Ages, a candy-coloured fantasy land of knights and dragons and damsels in distress. This is sometimes achieved with subtle lyrical nods, and others musically, such as ‘Princess’s Song’ which sounds like a lo-fi punk take on a Medieval ballad. Eternal Loving is perhaps best summed up by ‘Dreamer’s Song’, which has it all—supremely catchy hooks, galloping percussion, oohing and aahing harmonies, flutters of flute and daydreams of ye olden days.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

American Dreams

“We want to play and experiment, layer and move between different spaces in recording, and extend the limits of our instruments to sing and break in new ways,” explained Shovel Dance Collective of their experimental folk sound. “Improvising, textural playing, and moving as one free organic organism are all part of the experiments we try and make in form. It’s all towards this one goal: constructing the Shovel Dance world and saying what we feel needs saying.” Latest album The Shovel Dance saw the outfit “position themselves within an exciting contemporary movement,” as we wrote in our review, “and The Shovel Dance is sure to join the likes of Lankum’s False Lankum and Shane Parish’s Liverpool in their mission to push old sounds and stories into new dimensions.”

S. Raekwon – Steven

Father/Daughter Records

A moniker can offer many things for an artist, not least a sense of separation between their ‘real’ and performing selves, but while Steven Raekwon Reynolds released his latest record Steven under the name S. Raekwon, the album’s title is suggestive of the manner in which the songs work to close this gap in search of authenticity. Because this is a personal album in the most practical sense. Reynolds did all the writing, production, engineering and mixing, not to mention played every instrument with the exception of the drums. What emerged is a collection of songs which serves to illuminate the different parts of their curator, as though the record is a prism through which he shines himself, each track a different wavelength of his personality stratified according to mood. “Maybe subliminally or unconsciously, the songs kind of grouped together in a certain way to explore different areas of myself,” he explains. “The beginning is rage and angriness in a certain way. The middle is this uncertainty of questioning yourself, who you are, and if you’re a good person. And then at the end, I think it comes to a place of resolution. I’m just examining myself and trying to come to a better understanding of who I am.”

Sinai Vessel – I SING

Keeled Scales

In October, Caleb Cordes announced that Sinai Vessel, his moniker for the past fifteen years, had come to an end. “You have taught me everything and I’m taking it all with me,” he wrote in a statement of social media, looking forward to new, healthier future without the constant striving for further success and recognition in the cockfight that is the music industry. Released back in the summer before this news broke, the fourth Sinai Vessel album I SING represents both a parting gift from a project that has meant so much to so many, and a frank examination of the factors which grind artists down to the point of submission, taking on themes so often absent from art with a sincere yet unromantic air. “I sing for a reason,” Cordes sings on the title track. “My reason’s the same // as the nurses buying rentals
/ and rides to broadway
/ who fill up big bars on buses
/ and fall off shit-faced / and the trained men who clock in / coming back from smoke breaks
/ who zoom in from satellites
/ to bomb palisades.” Because I SING is an album about the rarest of things: money, or the lack thereof. How contemporary society seems built to punish anyone who dares attempt a living through art, and the ways in which the compulsion to create persists in ways both magical and mundane. “I sing ‘cos I wake up
/ again and again,” as the title track continues. “It never stops coming
/ it doesn’t make sense.” Sinai Vessel is dead, long live Caleb Cordes.

Slippers – So You Like Slippers

Lame-O Records

“It was childhood residence Atlanta that lit Madeleine BB’s creative fire. The city is home to the headquarters of Cartoon Network, which inspired not only her interest in animation, but indie rock too. ‘Cartoon Network… was a big part of my life growing up,’ she says. ‘They always had a lot of indie bands in the fold there—I remember there was this Powerpuff Girls music compilation that had Devo and Apples in Stereo and Shonen Knife on it. My dad bought that for me and I just became obsessed with it.’ Many of the tracks on [Slippers‘] So You Like Slippers? are a product of this kind of cross pollination, either inspired by or written specifically for BB’s animations. ‘I was trying to make these jokey kid’s songs, sort of like They Might Be Giants, to go along with my animations,’ she describes, and it’s clear this visual starting point provided a sense of creative freedom. License to write quickly and without inhibition, and the ability to explore themes and feelings that could be painstakingly overwrought with charming ease.” [Review]

Tasha – All This and So Much More

Bayonet Records

“Finds an artist embracing the pace and breadth of their new life. Confronting each day with a sense of defiance rather than looking for somewhere to hide.” So we wrote of Tasha‘s All This and So Much More in a preview back in the summer, an album written amid a flurry of experiences that ran the gamut between agonising (unexpected grief, an abrupt separation) and amazing (a role in the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Illinoise). Where many might have sought some form of retreat from life’s constant barrage of change, the Chicago artist instead decided to lean into the momentum to embrace the potential of forward motion. “I’m overcome at the wonder around me,” she sings on the quasi-title track ‘So Much More’. “I fill my lungs, feel the air rush inside me / Could this be fun? Could I be happy?” The album works through the doubt of such questions with decisiveness, choosing to believe that the impossible might be true, life a joyous experience after all. “What if my hope didn’t have a ceiling? / What I want most, all I imagined / What if I chose to settle for nothing less than magic?”

Trace Mountains – Into the Burning Blue

Lame-O Records

Glance at the title of Trace Mountains‘ latest album Into the Burning Blue and you’d be forgiven for expecting a descent into something deep and dark, an assumption only strengthened by opener ‘In a Dream’. “A dispatch from whatever stage of capitalism we’re calling contemporary America as delivered from a breathless nighttime bike ride,” as we wrote of the track back in the summer. “The effect is passing through a dark passage full of eerie shadow without quite knowing if there’s an exit at the other end.” Yet rather than barrelling down towards some nadir, the track’s glittering eighties rock sensibilities manage to invert the arc, the climax instead finding Dave Benton breaching the surface into a wider world. Which isn’t to say the rest of Into the Burning Blue is bright and affirming, it is after all a record concerning the end and aftermath of a long-term relationship, rather that the shades of blue on offer are far more nuanced and diverse than you might at first expect. A picture of person moving through conflict and loss attuned to all the accompanying tones that come with it, and one delivered with all the widescreen confidence of Petty or Springsteen to boot.

villagerrr – Tear Your Heart Out

Darling Recordings

Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within, villagerrr‘s latest album Tear Your Heart Out sees Mark Allen Scott embrace his Midwestern roots for a country-inflected brand of indie rock. Chillicothe, Ohio might have felt constrictive growing up, but home is home and soon a sense of fondness began to blossom, and with it came a desire to acknowledge the fact. “I want to wear where I’m from and my family on my sleeve,” Scott explains. “I’m proud of the twangy influence in my music from corny country songs I’d hear on the bus rides to school. I feel like I’m reclaiming where I come from and making it my own.” The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life, be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories. Some of the tracks are tortured in their own quiet way (“Falling in and out of trust / With the ones you loved before,” as he sings on ‘Cry On’, “It’s not the way I hoped it would be / Oh, no”), some wryly funny (“I see you wearing your Carhartt jeans / Talking ’bout how you don’t got money,” is a refrain in ‘Car Heat’), but all are wrapped in a sense of understanding, as though villagerrr attempts to see through the tangle of emotions to see the fallible humans struggling underneath.

Waxahatchee – Tigers Blood

Anti- Records

When released in 2020, Waxahatchee‘s fifth full-length Saint Cloud felt like the pinnacle of the project, Katie Crutchfield pivots towards an alt-country aesthetic so seamless and fitting it appeared to be some form of completion. Only for Tigers Blood to roll around a few years later, an album which sees the Waxahatchee star rise even further. Unfazed by recent popularity, Crutchfield and co. resisted all the trappings of success and temptations to transcend into the mainstream to instead focus on the present. There are no synths on Tigers Blood. No cinematic pop flourishes. No indication of burning through a newly weighty budget. Which is to say, the album finds Crutchfield not so much dreaming of what Waxahatchee could become, but instead concentrating on exactly what it is. The result is full of heart, romance and hard-won authenticity that could only stem from a place of confidence. Waxahatchee might have found its final form, but you sense this is only its beginning.

Wendy Eisenberg – Viewfinder

American Dreams

“When Wendy Eisenberg finally got Lasik surgery after a lifelong struggle against an assortment of ocular and vision-based afflictions, the resulting impact went far deeper than they perhaps expected […] Viewfinder emerges from within this new experience of the world, reckoning with exactly what it means to see and not to see, and how beauty and meaning are inherent within both experiences […] How does our understanding of the physical world change according to our ability to visually perceive it? And what about other planes—the emotional, spiritual and metaphysical?” [Review]

West of Roan – Queen of Eyes

Spinster

“A god of doorways and portals, a god of seeing in the dark and in dreams, a saint of weeping in sorrow or in joy.” That’s how Laurel Premo, writing in the album notes, describes the titular figure of West of Roan‘s latest record Queen of Eyes. The guide which leads Annie Schermer and Channing Showalter deep into a realm of myth, archetype and imagery, some otherworld beneath our own which bears the load of all that has been before and will surely arrive in time. A place where both personal, historical and cultural trauma unwinds itself as story. When we say West of Roan is a project steeped in the folk tradition, we mean it in a fundamental sense beyond any musical style. That urge to communicate, console, explain or contextualise. To take on the largest of themes in the ways humans always have. The result isn’t so much ambiguous as multifaceted. Stark, beguiling, full of glory and grief. As mysterious as the Queen herself, demanding you submit to its forces to discover the transcendence within.

Why Bonnie – Wish On The Bone

Fire Talk

“How do we live authentically within a world which demands we perform and pretend? Is it possible to confront the true dismal nature of things and still retain a sense of hope? Such questions have weighed on [Blair] Howerton since previous Why Bonnie album 90 in November, not least because she felt she had evolved beyond the wistful country-inflected style those songs presented. “I’ve changed since that album, and I trust that I’ll probably continue to change,” as Howerton explains. Wish On The Bone looks to pinpoint who she is at this point in time without committing to any lasting identity. To possess the confidence to work beyond the expectations of preconception and present however feels right within the current moment. Hence an album which foregoes easy pigeonholing in terms of style, unified instead by the defiant new self-confidence which underpins it. “You owe it to the people who are experiencing the worst to just keep pushing,” as Howerton concludes. “These songs were written out of hope for a better future. I’m not naïve, the world is fucked up, but I think you can radically accept that while still believing it’s possible to change things.” [Review]

Wild Pink – Dulling the Horns

Fire Talk

If recent years have seen Wild Pink’s star rise, then Dulling the Horns could be said to see it begin its arc back earthward, returning not to obscurity but a gravity-saddled weight and heft, the loud rush of the atmosphere roaring in its ears. Recorded live with all the grit and raw energy of the band’s live show left intact, it feels like both a throwback to their early work and a new chapter entirely, losing the wide-screen scope and sparkling electronics in favour of something with a little less polish.  “I didn’t want to clean up anymore,” says lead John Ross. “In doing so we’ve arrived at a new place.” Thematically it leaps around, touching on everything from Dracula and Michael Jordan to the Waco siege and Lefty Ruggiero, and this willingness to reach wide and chase tangents only furthers the sense of immediacy, resulting in the most urgent Wild Pink album to date.

Wishy – Triple Seven

Winspear

Released hot on the heels of December 2023’s successful EP Paradise, Wishy‘s debut full-length Triple Seven seemed to confirm suspicions the Indiana outfit possess the magic Midas touch, a spontaneous jackpot on first pull of the lever which included an NME cover among other such acclaim. And though the journey to that recognition was far more convoluted in reality, something about this iteration, led by songwriters Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites, possesses an undeniable lightning-in-a-bottle charm. A sound which “pays homage to forebears […] while fashioning the nineties-nostalgic sound into something entirely their own,” as we put it, combining dream pop, shoegaze and indie rock influences into something as polished as it is fun.

Young Jesus – The Fool

Saddle Creek

“The pressures of touring had seen the original Young Jesus band slowly disintegrate, and the mosaic pop of Shepherd Head demanded hours spent alone in front of a computer. Exhausted and disillusioned by the process, Rossiter pined for something less abstract. A way to express his creativity rooted in the real world. So he turned to gardening, studying permaculture and the slow process of nurturing it demands. Only then came a chance encounter with Shahzad Ismaily, originating in a shared interest in the work of Milford Graves, and a slow process of coaxing. Rossiter would work on music then tend Ismaily’s New York garden between sessions. At home in LA, he did the reverse, planting trees and laying paths with Alex Babbitt and Alex Lappin before gathering around the piano to play and sing. Slowly the compulsion to make music returned, though now informed by the lessons learnt whilst working on the natural world. The resulting album The Fool feels like another milestone for Young Jesus. A continuation of the searching style which has so long marked the project, but one armed with a new array of tools and techniques to perhaps arrive closer to a satisfying end.” [Review]

The post Year in Review: 2024 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Montreal artist Cassandra Angheluta uses the moniker APACALDA to create an atmospheric blend of shadowy indie pop and emotive indie rock. Early next summer, she will release There’s a Shadow In My Room and It Isn’t Mine, a much-anticipated album that explores a person’s journey from unblemished purity to marked and bruised with life’s burdens. Displaying this dark mood in full effect, latest single ‘Dead Weight’ is a song about watching helplessly as a loved one spirals into addiction. “True love, whether romantic or platonic, can be imprisoning,” APACALDA explains of the song. “There are journeys—like addiction—that people ultimately have to face within themselves to find healing. Watching them go through this is incredibly hard because you’re constantly battling the fear of losing them.”

There’s a Shadow In My Room and It Isn’t Mine is due to be released in June next year.

Blood Lemon – Perfect Too

Uniting over a shared love of Kim Deal and 90s Riot Grrrl music, Boise three-piece Blood Lemon burst onto the scene in 2021 with their self-titled debut, combining musical expertise with political urgency to create a searing sound. Now the trio—Lisa Simpson (Finn Riggins, Treefort Music Fest), Melanie Radford (Built to Spill, Marshall Poole) and percussionist Lindsey Lloyd (Tambalka)—are preparing to release new EP Petite Deaths on Moon Ruins, and lead single ‘Perfect Too’ sees an escalation of this style. A seven-minute behemoth which sets its furious sights on the dead end of greed and endless treadmill in search of perfection.

Watch the video directed and edited by Grant Osman with animation by James W.A.R. Lloyd below:

Petite Deaths is out in the 17th January via Moon Ruins and you can pre-order it now.

Daneshevskaya – Scrooge

Daneshevskaya‘s Long Is The Tunnel was one of 2023’s most inventive and ambitious releases, using rich arrangements and distinctive vocals to present the individual experience as a patchwork of histories and hopes for the future. Again out via Winspear, new single ‘Scrooge’ is no less layered and finely crafted. Drawing loosely on the titular figure, the track brings to life a sense of growing alienation within a relationship, as though the significant other is slowing deforming into a stranger in real time. “Ebenezer, I wish you wouldn’t stay,” admits the opening line, and the rest of the track is equally frank. “When you talk like that I don’t recognize you,” as the chorus goes. “When you move like that I don’t recognize you / I don’t even think you notice.” Watch the video below, directed by Madeline Leshner and Zach Stone with cinematography by Stone and Isaac Berner:

‘Scrooge’ is out now via Winspear and available from the Daneshevskaya Bandcamp page.

David Allred – Oh Lauren

“Death, grief and loss are understandably key moods, but perhaps the most striking emotion is that of longing,” we wrote of David Allred‘s forthcoming album The Beautiful World on Erased Tapes. “Not only a desire to return to the past and that which is lost, but also for something better in the future.” After the title track weaved seemingly mundane details into a picture of a fulfilling life, new single ‘Oh Lauren’ continues this spirit with an even more direct focus. Dedicated to a childhood friend who took her own life at a young age, the song collects the tangle of competing emotions surrounding the event and aims to communicate them as honestly as possible. Mourning and confusion, a desire to understand, as well as the enduring sense of gratitude for having known her at all.

Don’t Worry – Ever So Clear

Released to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of the band and in preview of a third full-length album scheduled for sometime in 2025, ‘Ever So Clear’ sees Harlow, Essex indie rockers Don’t Worry continue the sense of heartfelt emotion and playful humour which made 2022 album Remorseless Swing so special. “All night I’m thinking for England / I can’t be with you at all,” sings songwriter Samuel Watson, casting an unflinching eye on a personal situation and reporting back every uncomfortable detail. The result might not be the most romantic of pictures, but the earnest delivery lends an affirming edge, and positions the singalong refrain as something between a promise and a plea.

I just need a little time
Stay with me
I just need a little time

 Free Lunch – rosebud

The recording project of Bournemouth brothers Henry and Ted Scanlan, Free Lunch rose from the ashes of two solo outfits—Sprog and Wilder respectively—and has come to welcome an array of friends and collaborators such as Michael Rea (Symbol Soup) and Dave ‘The Attic’ Mountain. New single ‘rosebud’ highlights the atmosphere and versatility of the resulting sound, building from warm, relaxed beginnings into something altogether deeper. A middle lull shimmers to near-silence as though to herald what is coming, and the closing third of the track makes good on the promise with a climax full of weight and soaring release.

Leif Vollebekk – Peace of Mind (Morning)

Leif Vollebekk‘s new album Revelation, out now on Secret City Records, is one keyed into mystery and ambiguity, drawing on Jung’s Dreams, Memories, Reflections to explore themes such as alchemy and the unknowable divine. The sort of release which appears to be inching closer to some truth with every listen. It is fitting then that Vollebekk has returned to some of the tracks again, recording different versions as though in search of that elusive perfection. ‘Peace of Mind (Morning)’ offers an acoustic take which looks to carve out its own space away from the album. A small pocket of calm to be maintained and returned to. Watch the visualiser by director, cinematographer and editor Andy Mann and colourist Beatrice Tremblay below:

Revelation is out now via Secret City Records.

leoblu – PEACHES

Following this summer’s EP Blu Lucid Nightmare and a recent collaboration with World Wide Web, leoblu (that’s Åland-born, Berlin-based producer and artist Julia Carlsson) returns with new single ‘PEACHES’. Making what we described previously as “ambiguous and atmospheric music which situates intimate emotion against the more mysterious forces at work around us,” leoblu specialises in the dark and haunting, and ‘PEACHES’ is no exception. An indie pop song filtered through a digital prism, it combines synths, beats and Carlsson’s signature vocals to create something at once emotional and oddly mesmerising.

‘PEACHES’ is out now via streaming services.

MacGregor Burns – Can’t Go Back

“Stretch[es] the gamut between despondent, desperate and something like tenuous hope as they strive towards a truer version of self, whatever that might look like.” So we wrote of MacGregor Burns‘s ‘Silent Answers’ back in September, introducing the artist’s idiosyncratic personality. Combining nostalgic nods to the likes of David Byrne while forging a new path forwards, latest single ‘Can’t Go Back’ looks for further clues in the fertile space between the familiar and the new. Going back might not be possible, but there’s no harm in looking to those who have walked before us for indications of what direction we might take next.

Pleasure Systems – Merry Christmas

Described by label Primordial Void as “not quite Christmas music,” ‘Merry Christmas’ is the new single from Clarke Sondermann’s Pleasure Systems. It’s our first glimpse of his new working relationship with producer Ivan Berko, and channels the signature Pleasure Systems ruminative indie pop towards the layers of bittersweet memory that the festive season can often break open and reveal to us. Grant Chapman provides drums and May Rio sings along as Sondermann reflects on Christmases past, pairing a warm nostalgic fondness and moments of small beauty with a sharp pang of loss. The 7″ single and digital download comes complete with a b-side ‘Signing in My Sleep (Demo)’, so be sure not to miss out on that too.

The storm took down the power lines
it ripped the needles off the pines
but I see you at the door
and I couldn’t ask for more
Merry Christmas

winded – wish on the mezzanine

Based in Miami, winded was originally the solo project of lead Thrin Vianale, but has since expanded into a four-piece featuring Nick Cody (guitar) James Sturges (bass) and Gunther Schenk (drums). Their latest release, a double single featuring the tracks ‘wish on the mezzanine’ and ‘mercy 27’ is therefore something of a reintroduction. The ramshackle lo-fi pop of 2022’s schwartz provides is levelled up into something with genuine mass, pairing thick noisy fuzz and shredding guitar with hooky melodies and bright harmonies. ‘wish on the mezzanine’ is the perfect introduction—power pop meets shoegaze meets crunchy lo-fi rock.

Yoshika Colwell & The Vernon Spring – This Weather

In early December, English songwriter Yoshika Colwell will release a collaborative EP with The Vernon Spring (London composer and producer Sam Beste). The record finds the pair’s creative spirits coming together in an effortless flow, The Vernon Spring taking Colwell’s classical folk songwriting and spinning it off into new, daring territory. The focus was very much on intuition and improvisation, from snippets of melodies that arrived as if from the ether, to the lyrics themselves. “I sang without letting my analytical mind get in the way,” Colwell explains. “The words came out like in a conversation or thought, complete with strangeness and non sequiturs and contradictions.” Take a listen to the title track for a taste of what this sounds like.

The post Weekly Listening: November 2024 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The title track introduces the style with a fittingly intimate sound, positioning Allred next to the likes of Phil Elverum in his ability to weave mournful and often idiosyncratic soundscapes without sacrificing human warmth. “[The single] is about longing for a sense of community when friends are vastly scattered far and wide,” Allred explains. “Navigating the complexities of life and feeling a profound appreciation for old normalcy whilst reaching for an appreciation for what I have and who I am now.”

The details at the track’s heart are ostensibly mundane. Watching (or missing) Jeopardy, watching dogs at the dog park, walking a graveyard after dark. The individual threads which constitute the fabric of a fulfilled life. And with these in mind, the repeated refrain—”I want to belong in the beautiful world”—starts out like a plea but comes to represent something of a mission statement. The intention behind the track, and indeed the record more generally, making itself clearer with every repetition.

Watch the video directed by Allred and Fay Funk below:

The Beautiful World will be released on the 24th January via Erased Tapes and you can pre-order it now.

Photograph by Jayden Becker. Album photography by David Allred with creative direction by Robert Raths

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Described as a “multifaceted, multigenerational recording project from Albuquerque, New Mexico,” AJ Woods counts members of a Hawk and a Hacksaw, The Sir Douglas Quintet, Neutral Milk Hotel and Heather Trost Band among its roster, and the level of experience shines through in the sound. Forthcoming via Perpetual Doom, new album Hawk Is Listenin’ uses this multitudinous style to evoke nature in all of its diversity, reminding us that not only should we be more attuned to the natural world, but moreover that it is more aware of our presence than we might think. The opener and title track sets out these ideas in characteristically inventive style, layering a dreamy folk song from all sorts of sounds and images, and punctuating the careful arrangement with bursts of evocative noise.

alx frncs – good is your friend

“An attempt to process an extremely difficult period via an intimate, gentle sound.” That’s what we wrote back in March about alx frncs‘s ‘i cant do anything right’, a song which typified the confessional yet empathetic nature of the Brighton songwriter’s work. Written in response to the loss of her childhood pet, new single ‘good is your friend’ is no different, exploring themes of grief and mourning in a kind of post-religious space. The lapsed-Catholic state of mind where dogma might no longer be the organising logic of a life, yet the imagery and rhythms remain. The atmosphere is subdued and enveloping, with a textured cinematic feel that blossoms from its modest beginning.

christ i’ve given in
give in me mortal sin
if we don’t find out
where we’ll end up now

time,
passes by

Bitter Calm – Surrender

‘Salt’, the first single from Bitter Calm‘s forthcoming album Eternity In The Lake of Fire on Earth Libraries, represented something of a change for the band. As we wrote in a preview, “the song is still concerned with the weighty themes of love and death” that marked debut Good Grief, but “the shadowy slowcore sensibilities are replaced with something altogether brighter and more melodic.” But rather than a compensatory turn to positivity, the tone is something won in the hardest of manners, brightness not as an absence of dark but rather the strange marvel at being alive to record at all. Final single ‘Surrender’ turns to alt folk sensibilities to further this style, positioning itself between acts like Songs: Ohia and Purple Mountains, the high priests of such moods.

Eternity In The Lake of Fire is out on the 6th September via Earth Libraries and available to pre-order from the Bitter Calm Bandcamp page.

Decimal Decade – Trace

Decimal Decade is a recording project led by Chicago-based songwriter, producer and multi-instrumentalist Nico Tiparescu. Born in Venezuela to Romanian and Peruvian parents and growing up in Spain and later Chile, Tiparescu has a more diverse background than most, and the breadth of his personal experience is evident in the debut Decimal Decade EP, Soon to Evolve. It’s a synthesis of styles and interests which emerged from the dissolution of a previous band, Tiparescu seeking to rekindle his love of music after a period of disappointment. “A constant parameter that I tried to follow was that everything in the songs felt natural to me,” as he explains. “All the ideas I put in had to be completely in line with what felt honest. I was just moving towards what made me excited about the music.” Listen to single ‘Trace’ for a glimpse into the release:

Masayoshi Fujita – Our Mother’s Lights (feat. Moor Mother)

Coming next month on Erased Tapes, Masayoshi Fujita‘s new album Migratory sees the Japanese composer, vibraphonist and marimba player continue to explore the possibilities that exist in the spaces between electronic and classical music. The record’s title is apt, the release drawing upon the phenomenon of avian migration as a central image for its far-reaching sound. The album was “inspired by my experiences of living abroad and returning to my homeland,” Fujita explains, “as well as by the artists featured on this album who also somehow travelled or lived in other countries across the boundaries, and being influenced by the music of other lands but at the same time somehow led to their roots.” Artists like Mattias Hållsten and Hatis Noit feature on the album, but its is Camae Ayewa, AKA Moor Mother (Irreversible Entanglements / The Art Ensemble of Chicago), who steals the show with vocals on new single ‘Our Mother’s Light’.

Neighbours Burning Neighbours – Always Winning

Described as “an anthem for all of those who struggle with navigating the whirlwind of ADHD,” Neighbours Burning Neighbours‘ new single ‘Always Winning’ finds the Rotterdam-based outfit further their distinctive blend of post-rock and noise pop sensibilities. The song, a glimpse of their forthcoming self-titled album on Subroutine Records, follows previous track ‘Neil Young‘ in its ability to sound at once discordant and infectious, pulling the audience into its rhythm and holding them there through the ebb and flow between taut slacks and hectic rapids.

Oh, Rose – Toilet Water

Back in June we shared ‘The Call’, a single from Oh, Rose‘s new album Dorothy, coming soon via Antiquated Future. A track which “originated in an inflection point,” as we wrote, “one where Rose was made to consciously decide to continue her pursuit of her artistic energies when life seemed intent on strangling them.” Named after Olivia Rose’s grandmother, the album takes inspiration from the skill of quilting. A collection of styles and genres stitched together with patience, where many small pieces unite into something greater than the sum of their parts. “I always said this album was going to be a love album,” she says, “and this record feels emblematic of the love I shared with her.” The closing track of the album latest single ‘Toilet Water’ sees the Olympia, Washington outfit work up an affirming chorus in the face of continuing difficulty, as though wrapped in the blanket of the record, they are ready to face down whatever might come their way.

Retail Drugs – Net

The new project of Laveda‘s Jake Brooks, Retail Drugs offers the Brooklyn-based artist a vehicle to explore new sonic directions and get playful with production. His album i love you so ! is out now via Candlepin Records, a record the label say is about “a distaste for music scenes, the grief of losing a loved one, fear of age & irrelevance, & clutching on to specific moments in time even while finally understanding that moving on is a part of life.” Lead single ‘Net’ is a great intro to Brooks’s blend of saturated tape textures and DAW wizardry, a slow-burning track that sits somewhere between the dense slowcore of Duster and They Are Gutting a Body of Water with the joyful, earnest and slightly submerged delivery of early Youth Lagoon.

Surf Party, USA – Beach Ball

We’ve featured a number of tracks from Surf Party, USA in recent times, with ‘Barrel’ and ‘Umbrella’ capturing different dimensions of their new album, Surf Party, USA 2. The former offered all the fun and chaos of a good day on swell, while the latter was more reflective, as though the sun was dipping below the horizon at the end of the day. With the record now out, the Brooklyn-based outfit have released another single, ‘Beach Ball’, a song which sits at the languid end of the Surf Party spectrum. Perhaps it represents that peace when night has finally fallen and everything seems to find a kind a melancholy perspective.

teasea – Always

As well as being half of the indie-psych soul duo Ritual Talk, Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist Tom Criblez also records solo under the moniker teasea. The act is a vehicle for a heavier, shoegaze-adjacent style which sits somewhere between My Bloody Valentine and Midwife. Part of a new EP, single ‘Always’ is a great place to start for the uninitiated. A densely layered track which envelops the listener from the off. But more than being a lesson in size and heft, the song is far more nuanced. Introspection manifest as sound, the track’s depth coming to mimic that of our interior lives, not to mention the murky network of relationships we maintain. But for all of its gloomy weight, there’s a certain lightness arcing through the sound too. The sense everything is reaching towards some state of enlightened truth.

‘Always’ is out now.

Wanda What – Besties

In recent weeks we’ve previewed Dyke TV, the new album from Harmony Reynolds’s Wanda What, with a number of singles which brought into relief what we’ve described as the “central tension” of the project, “one which might be crudely described as the friction between dreams and reality.” ‘Big Tree‘ offered a country-inflected croon which split the difference between playfulness and heartache, while ‘Bye Bye‘ turned to noughties buzz bands for influence for its sunny and energetic sound. With the album now out via Youth Riot Records, latest single ‘Besties’ shows yet another dimension of the project. A pop banger which doubles as an ode to those friends who always have your back. “I love to lean into a sort of goofy cheerfulness,” Reynolds describes. “Its okay to simply write a pop banger about loving your friends.”

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“An embrace of contradiction,” was how we described Wins Above Replacement, last year’s sports-themed full-length by the amazing Lorenzo Landini. “Because, like sports, life can feel like a whole lot of suffering until those moments where it’s suddenly wonderful.” What he calls “a piece about hungering to belong in an increasingly disconnected and brutalizing culture,” new single ‘Leave No Trace’ sees Landini adopt a newly polished style without sacrificing the immediacy and charm which made the previous album so striking. Again the mood splits the difference between playfulness and sincerity, the vocals full of searching questions and wry humour, with a rock energy coming to drive the track forward and towards its cathartic conclusion.

Braden Lawrence – Gary

A song “told through the lens of an elderly man who’s looking for love after a tragic loss,” ‘Gary’ is the lead single and title track from a forthcoming EP by Braden Lawrence. Perhaps best known as a founding member of Philly rock band The Districts, Lawrence also previously recorded under the moniker Haggert Mctaggert, but has switched to his real name for last year’s album When You Lose the Light, released via Anxiety Blanket Records. Again on Anxiety Blanket, the Gary EP promises to continue the record’s blend of folk songwriting and contemporary indie pop. ‘Gary’ the single is a good introduction, a downbeat but sincere song full of wistful longing for things past, all hushed vocals and gently poignant instrumentation.

When you lose something you find something new
That’s what they said and then I met you

‘Gary’ is out now via streaming services.

Hatis Noit – Aura (Laraaji Rework)

The latest “rework” of a track from their acclaimed album Aura on Erased Tapes, London-based, Japanese voice artist Hatis Noit has teamed up with “multi-instrumentalist, laughter meditation practitioner and ambient godfather” Laraaji to reinterpret the album’s opener and title track. Previous reworkings have seen the likes of Preservation and Armand Hammer push Noit’s work towards hip hop, whereas Laraaji uses open tune zither, kalimba and vocals to lead it further out into ambient landscapes, leading to a multi-timbral sound which reaches the for the horizon.

Hemlock Ernst – Raised in the South

Hemlock Ernst, the rap project of Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, has announced a new album, Studying Absence in collaboration with Icky Reels. Released via Beans‘ Tygr Rawwk Rcrds this coming October, the record sees Herring swap the typical jazz and soul beats of the Hemlock Ernst sound for Icky Reels’s industrial sensibilities and forces his most ambitious record to date. One loaded with all the history and ghosts of the South, that which happened and what might have been. “Studying Absence is what I see when I look in the mirror,” as Herring explains. “The record explores the magic that can arise when people are brought together by fate, and the poignant absence that underlines the human experience.” Check out lead single ‘Raised in the South’ now:

Studying Absence is out on the 16th October via Tygr Rawwk Rcrds.

Julia-Sophie – i was only

With new full-length forgive too slow, out now via Ba Da Bing Records, Julia-Sophie “uses her danceable electro pop sound to present something messier but more authentic,” we wrote in a preview. “As though the album is not a straight line towards a final goal but an orbit around an elusive answer.” Closer ‘telephone‘ offered what we described as “a lush song of love, loneliness and longing, where the brightness on the horizon might be some emergent hope or just the neon smudge of the last place still open so late at night,” whereas final single ‘i was only’ invites Noah Yorke to paint the romantic yearning underpinning the entire release. “I was only falling in love with you,” Julia-Sophie sings, and the swirling soundscape comes to mimic such an overwhelming descent.

ladylike – Horse’s Mouth

Taking equal doses of folk, shoegaze and post-rock to form their distinctive sound, Brighton‘s ladylike sit somewhere between caroline and Big Thief, conjuring expansive soundscapes populated with intricate details. Following on from the success of debut single ‘Southbound’ and slots at Glastonbury and Green Man, new track ‘Horse’s Mouth’ is the ideal starting point for those looking to get on board before ladylike really take off. An ever-shifting song which seems at once intimate and sprawling, as though in delving so deep in its introspection it inverts to find a vast internal landscape, one as majestic and melancholic as anything you might find in the wild.

Langkamer – At the Lake

Last month we introduced Langzamer, the forthcoming album by Langkamer on Breakfast Records, with lead single ‘Richard E. Grant’. Indicating something of a change of tone for the outfit, the song displayed a slower, more considered pace to house its confessional exploration of grief. Latest single ‘At the Lake’ invites The Gold Dregs to help Langkamer further this sound, reaching for something as close to Americana as anything they have released to date. “‘At The Lake’ is a song about the fallout of binge drinking culture,” says drummer/lead vocalist Josh Jarman, “and the prestige that we attach to the idea of the poète maudit. The way we romanticise unhealthy behaviour in the name of creativity.” Hence references to Janis Joplin and James Joyce in the almost mournful sound, the track unfurling with all the slow, soul-searching regret of the worst day after.

Langzamer will be released on Breakfast Records on 16th October and is available to pre-order via the Langkamer Bandcamp.

Madam Sad – Exs

Earlier in the month shared Madam Sad‘s ‘Hope For You’, a single which introduced Maddison Schreiber and Evelyn Charlotte Joe’s “willingness,” as we put it, “to confront difficult things with a compassionate face.” With its depiction of relationships and their inevitable end, latest single ‘Exs’ is no different. A song which looks to utilise a sense of personal growth in order to face such breaks with a more neutral, or even positive, attitude. “The song title is a way of holding myself accountable to make sure I am always hoping for the happiness of those who have hurt me,” Schreiber explains. “I also do get to a more genuine place where I feel compassion for an ex-lover’s success, and that’s a nice kind of sad.”

Exs is out now via streaming services.

Niall Summerton – Train

If Niall Summerton‘s previous album What Am I Made Of? presented “easygoing pop […] packed with lo-fi charm,” as we wrote last year, then new single ‘Train’ offers an altogether more shadowy side to his work. Again released via Tiny Library Records, the single pairs prominent drums and almost grungy guitar into a more conflicted atmosphere, the skipping rhythm faltering on occasion as though to evoke the apprehension at the track’s heart before rising into the squally climax. “It’s going to get harder,” Summerton sings, and amid the tumult of the closing seconds, you get the sense the prophecy has already arrived.

‘Train’ is out now via streaming services.

Nick Zanka – Softshoe

Described as “one part intervention, one part pep talk,” ‘Softshoe is the latest single from Nick Zanca ahead of his forthcoming LP, Hindsight. Recent singles ‘Little Professor’ and ‘You Two’ took on neurodivergence and open relationships respectively, and ‘Softshoe’ feels like it meets both tracks halfway. “I wrote this song for a dear friend and longtime collaborator during a period where we were struggling to communicate,” Zanca explains. “When zoomed out, it is a love song to a friend and a promise to persist and keep the faith.”

Slark Moan – Dollhouse Heart

The first glimpse of forthcoming EP The Return of Guitar Music, ‘Dollhouse Heart’ is the new single from Slark Moan, alter ego of New York multi-instrumentalist Mark Sloan. “[The song] is about feeling small amidst the enormity of life, and the overwhelming sadness and beauty of living an ephemeral existence within an infinite universe,” Sloan explains, illustrating both the scope and inspiring nature of the record. “I recognize that I’ve gained an unabashed realism,” they continue, “creative empowerment, and gratitude that my younger self just couldn’t access.” Sloan is joined by Nashville songwriter and visual artist Meg Elsier, and together they conjure something that oozes calm confidence and newfound wisdom as life’s many emotions threaten to burst from the seams. Watch Diego Molina’s video below:

‘Dollhouse Heart’ is out now on streaming services.

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Since the release of the album, Erased Tapes have been sharing a series of reworked songs as standalone singles, with the likes of Matthew Herbert and William Basinski reimaging Hatis Nori tracks. The label connected with producer Preservation (Mos Def, RZA, MF Doom) while he was living in Hong Kong to work on his album Eastern Medicine Western Illness, and he set out with the intention of preserving Hatis Noit’s singular vocal style while “bridg[ing] sonic time.” Fat Possum duo Armand Hammer were enlisted too, and their version of ‘Jomon’ brings two cultures together with searing power. “It’s such a miracle to me,” Haiti Noit explains, “that, thanks to Preservation and his powerful rework, Armand Hammer could connect this energy back to their own bold and beautiful culture and history on the other side of the globe. I could not stop the tears.”

Aura is out now via Erased Tapes and available from Bandcamp.

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