The cover painting and title, is a nod to Bottles of Hope For Gaza, where in Egypt, bottles containing rice, flour, and beans were thrown into sea in hopes that they would reach the shores of Gaza. In organizing this project, I hope to offer encouragement to anyone in the music community, to speak up in song and to utilize our collective power. I believe it is vital to our own hearts, and our lives as artists, to empathize and show empathy to this cause.

All proceeds of the release will be donated to ANERA, a charity which offers a whole suite of humanitarian aid and emergency relief in Gaza, as well as across the wider Middle East. The organisation’s motto is “Where hope finds a way,” a sentiment more relevant than ever. Because for all of the hand-wringing and well-intentioned prayers, what the people need now is action. And the only way to achieve the required response is for wide swathes of those watching on to roll up their sleeves and do anything they can. Songs of Hope for Gaza is just one small effort to add to this collective action, and one which will hopefully inspire others to lend their energy to the drive. Victoria invokes a quote from Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory to encapsulate the spirit of the release:

All of this talking about what’s up in the sky, or down in hell, for that matter, isn’t half as important as what’s right here, right now, right in front of our eyes. Things are tough. Folks broke. Kids hungry. Sick. Everything. And people has just got to have more faith in one another, believe in each other. There’s a spirit of some kind we’ve all got. That’s got to draw us all together.

Songs of Hope for Gaza will be released on the 28th October via Pretty Purgatory and Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

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The Friendship sound has always existed within an ambiguous space. Each release plays as a stagnant dispatch from a world in motion, Wriggins left to pick the bones out of any given moment in futile hope of making sense of his existence. The grand narratives of life—be that love, work, success or self-improvement—are often revealed to be emptier than he had hoped, yet the inverse is also shown to be true. The ordinary, the everyday, that is where the sublime lurks for those with the time or motivation to look.

Caveman Wakes Up promises to delve deeper into this idea, a record which finds the familiar vocals and lyricism supported by Friendship’s most ambitious and exploratory sound to date. The core group of Peter Gill (guitar, synth, vibraphone, vox), Michael Cormier-O’Leary (drums, percussion, piano, organ, synth, vibraphone, drum machine, string and woodwind arrangement), Jon Samuels (bass, synth) and Wriggins (vox, guitar) are supported with occasional appearances from Adelyn Strei (flute, clarinet) and Jason Calhoun (violin), and the result further tests the boundaries between country and its adjacent genres—leaning out across the various schools of folk rock and even further still.

‘Free Association’ is the ideal entry point to this freshly curious sound. “Another one about love and other people and how the only hope we’ve got in the search for meaning is to make it up,” as Wriggins told Stereogum. “The Mellotron sax and voice patch were both jokes that we ended up loving. Also the only song with synth bass. We’re proud as hell of the production.”

Watch the video directed by Zach Puls below:

Caveman Wakes Up will be released on the 16th May via Merge Records and you can pre-order it now from the Friendship Bandcamp page.

Cover art: Matthew Reed, Tenant’s Rights, acrylic on canvas. Design: Daniel Murphy

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Originating as a narrative poem, The Chairman Dances‘ new album Evening Song traces the early days of a nascent relationship. 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. Lead single ‘We Rifled Through’ drops us into the middle of this burgeoning intimacy, a scene which might appear mundane elevated by its details. A snapshot of two people meeting which not only evokes the connection growing between them, but the paths their lives have taken to lead them to that moment.

“Your parents give you this?” “Which? No that’s mine.
I’m the lone church goer.” “How does that happen?”
“One day, I went to church. I stayed. That’s it.”
“That’s it? How did you know to go?” “I stole
a book with an address.” Chris laughs. “You what?”
“You know those bins that sit outside of schools—
you put your textbooks in them when you’re done,
maybe a blanket; someone comes and drives
them off to needy kids? One day, my friends
and I—we’re young, we’re bored—we rifled through.
There, at the bottom, four or five of…”, she points.

Charlotte Jacobs – mala

Speaking of narrative poems, Belgium-born, New York-based vocalist, composer, and producer Charlotte Jacobs is releasing debut full-length a t l u s next month via New Amsterdam Records, and the album’s vocal-centric style could be said to represent its own contribution to the form. Jacobs’s spoken word delivery is held within soundscapes which blur the line between avant pop and contemporary classical, the style marrying the intentional craft of minimalism with intricate detail to create something almost otherworldly. Single ‘Mala’ highlights how the vocals serve as the anchor and guide for the listener. The thread which leads them through this strange and beautiful world.

Honeypuppy – Understatement

The led by songwriter Josie Callahan and featuring Adam Wayton (bass), Will Wise (lead guitar) and Jack Colclough (percussion), Honeypuppy is an Athens, Georgia-based project based on fun and mischief. The first in a new series of monthly singles ahead of forthcoming release DIRTY TV, ‘Understatement’ serves as the perfect introduction for anyone unacquainted with Callahan and co. A song typical of the band’s bittersweet sound where sincere emotion and sardonic wit sit side by side and neither comes out on top.

DIRTY TV is out later this year on Indecent Artistry.

jason calhoun + cla-ras – cruel work carols

Recorded for a tour earlier this year, cruel work carols is a new split release from jason calhoun and Jeremy Ferris’s cla-ras. The pair have long held our attention with their use of sound and textures. The former most recently with small circle on Dear Life Records, a release which blended “organic and synthetic noises into a kind of constellation,” we wrote in our review, “small points to grasp as we move downward, to contemplate in all of their fleeting insignificance. And the latter on releases like Five clusters, “with subtle intricacies growing from every crevice,” we wrote of Ferris’s work, “its ambient folk style sees the organic slowly overwhelm the electronic, evoking ecology’s reclamation of abandoned industrial land. cruel work carols is no less evocative, calhoun offering a world of static and scrambled light and cla-ras something altogether weightier and stark. But although quite different, both suggest some approaching transcendence, however ambiguous that force might be.

cruel work carols is out now and available from Bandcamp.

kennedy mann – On Video

“I watch my life on video / How the time just seems to fly / I put my whole life on video / With all the things that slip my mind.” So sings kennedy mann on deliciously nostalgic new single ‘On Video’, the latest solo track from an artist you might know as having fronted Philly dream pop outfit Highnoon. Mann’s previous singles were hushed lo-fi affairs, though while this maintains the emotional resonance, the sound possesses a layer of cinematic gloss fitting for the title. Ava Mirzadegan adds backing vocals to lift the track further, leading to something both trapped by and longing for the ever-alluring past.

Like how everything looks different
But I still feel the same
Holding onto glimpses
It’s better off that way

Kitty Fitz – Life of the Party

Last year the London-based songwriter Kitty Fitz put out All My Own Stunts via Sad Club Records, an EP which mixed equal parts vulnerability and charm to offer a sound at once laid back and emotionally charged. New EP The Man in Me, coming later this autumn via Sad Club once again, promises to build upon these foundations and push the Kitty Fitz sound further. Single ‘Life of the Party’ holds all of the tenderness and self-deprecative wit that made the previous EP so special, but held within a vivid pop sound that nods to the likes of Caroline Polachek. “At its heart it’s a song about social anxiety, which is something I’ve always wanted to write a song about” Fitz explains. “My mental health has been a really turbulent journey, and as someone who naturally comes off as very extroverted, I wanted to expose that I have always really struggled to fit in.”

Watch the visualiser by Amy Ryder below:

The Man in Me is out on the 31st October via Sad Club Records.

Klô Pelgag – Sans visage

This autumn sees the release of Abracadabra, the new album from Quebec‘s Klô Pelgag on Secret City Records which channels the magic, playfulness and wishful thinking of its titular exclamation in search of some miraculous answer to life’s questions. Latest single ‘Sans visage’ is an alluring introduction to Pelgag’s vivid brand of dream pop. An enveloping experience earnest in its emotion yet full of experimentation and curiosity. If, at its heart, Abracadabra is a spell designed in hope of or belief in the transformative potential of fun, then ‘Sans visage’ signals how such an incantation might be delivered with a straight face.

You have the clover and I, the luck
It seems to me
That we share the same silence
Without understanding
That time is not what changes us
That no trap has managed to catch us

Watch the video by Laurence Baz Morais below:

Abracadabra is out on the 11th October via Secret City Records and you can pre-order it now.

Masayoshi Fujita – Desonata

Migratory, the forthcoming album from Japanese composer, vibraphonist and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita “draw[s] upon the phenomenon of avian migration as a central image,” we wrote in a preview, and explores “the possibilities that exist in the spaces between electronic and classical music.” With the record out at the end of the week via Erased Tapes, Fujita has shared final single ‘Desonata’, and the origins of the track underline the process of experimentation and invention which underpin the release. “I remember when I tried to record the melody for this song. While improvising with the backing track, I was hearing a melody in my head and tried to play it, but somehow I kept hitting different notes than what I wanted,” Fujita explains. “When I listened back, it gave me a strange feeling, but I liked its unique mood and the new image it evoked, so I decided to use it for the song.”

 Robert Ascroft – Empty Pages

Following on from a successful single ‘Faded Photographs’ with Ruth Radelet, Rochester-based musician, producer and artist Robert Ascroft has returned with a new collaborative single, ‘Empty Pages’, on Hand Drawn Dracula. This time Zumi Rosow of The Black Lips fame lends vocals to a song straight out of the seventies. Derek James channels Mo Tucker in his drumming, leading to a beguilingly ambiguous interplay between rhythm and fuzz. To top things off, Ascroft puts his expertise in direction and photography to good use with a suitably cinematic video to accompany the track. Check it out below:

‘Empty Pages’ is out now Hand Drawn Dracula and available from Bandcamp.

roman around – Moves

We’ve written about Roman Rivera’s roman around a few times in recent times, appreciating the way they use a wide palette of post-punk, pop and R&B sensibilities to challenge the norm, be that of genre or gender. Again out via Trailing Twelve Records, new single ‘Moves’ continues the mission with an energetic examination of loss and adversity, or more specifically how to survive and thrive in the face of them. “‘Moves’ encapsulates the pivotal moments of my youth,” Rivera explains. “These experiences pushed me to surround myself with positive influences. My boundaries with love have been continually tested, such as being unable to contact my brother, watching old friends struggle with addiction, and being abruptly cut off by friends without explanation.”

‘Moves’ is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.

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Next month sees the release of small circle, a new Jason Calhoun album on Dear Life Records which follows up notebook and subsequent release ben c, this is for you by returning to the sensations experienced at the monastery. Bathed in quiet and lacking the tonal direction of its predecessors, the record works to conjure a sense of spiritual contemplation. Silence not as some absence but rather the fundamental element behind everything. If notebook left little space to hide, then small circle eradicates any cover, forcing Calhoun, and by extension to the listener, to face themselves amid an encompassing quiet and dwell on what they find there.

Opening the record and serving as the lead single, the title track welcomes the listener into this space. A brief introduction of quiet clarity which gives way to swirling static, as though the listener is led onto an elevator and lowered slowly into depths of themselves. The downward journey into this chasm is not as dark as one might expect, Calhoun blending organic and synthetic noises into a kind of constellation, small points to grasp as we move downward, to contemplate in all of their fleeting insignificance. Meanwhile, the background drone continues unabated, somehow suggestive of the essential force which must exist at the bottom of the descent.

Photo by Ava Mirzadegan, artwork by Ben Lovell

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Starting with 2019’s practice, Jason Calhoun began recording under his own name, a change that signalled a subtle and slow-dawning stylistic evolution while maintaining the dedication to texture, atmosphere and transient small details that made naps so good. “Calhoun makes music as patient and imperfect as the world around us,” we wrote of practice. “These are songs crafted from thick welcoming textures and a quiet cacophony of thuds and clicks, at once richly detailed and strangely spare, as if Calhoun is holding up a microphone to the hidden corners of the world, all dust motes and creaking beams and pale lemon sunlight.”

This month saw the release of notebook, a brand new album on Dear Life Records which, per the label, finds Calhoun “confronting doubt in his own abilities while affirming his unyielding faith in loved ones.” The songs were initially conceived during a stay at a Trappist monastery, and the quiet and self-reflective surroundings had an undeniable influence on the final work. The album is uncharacteristically direct, stripped of the shroud of field-recorded fuzz that is present on many previous releases, favouring instead a sense of purity and plain intention. Although not necessarily loud in volume, the songs are piercingly honest and ring clear with the vulnerability of opening oneself up to true feelings.

Jason was kind enough to answer some questions on notebook, so read on for insight into it’s creation, battling with self-doubt, and the beautiful cover art.

Hi Jason, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us. How does it feel to have another album out in the world?

Thanks so much for taking the time to consider what I do! Every time release day comes it honestly always feels like a weight off of my shoulders. It’s hard for me to stop making something, and by the time an album is out I’m usually on to the next thing. I’m glad it’s out for people to hear and maybe I can think about it a little less haha.

Some sense of the record came during a visit to a Trappist monastery. How did the experience inform notebook’s relatively stark, almost ascetic sound?

The beginnings of these pieces were all written out by hand while I was at the monastery, without an instrument to play and hear how they sound. I would hum them to myself and rely on my ear to discern what I was writing. I let those sit for nearly a year before I came back to them; I didn’t feel like I could touch them, or maybe I wasn’t ready. From there other layers were added and more parts were written, but there was a sense of stillness that I wanted to leave; all the first drafts were written as monophonic lines. I didn’t want to take that feeling away. I wanted to leave a lot of space for quiet so I decided to leave out field recordings entirely, allowing the silence to sit and stay somewhere amongst the tones. I found while I was at the monastery that it was impossible to hide from yourself, and I wanted that to be reflected in what I had started there.

I’m fascinated by the collection of sent and unsent text messages that form the album’s epigraph [e.g. “am i getting through to you? am i making sense? this is garbage”]. They act almost like archaeological fragments that give hints to its creation, illuminating the interplay between sincerity and self-doubt that underpins the music. Could you speak a little on the significance of these moods?

I think this might be the most insecure I’ve felt about a record. There doesn’t feel like there’s much space for me to hide. The emotional content of it feels pretty direct and potentially sappy, which is how I strive and fail to be (direct) and often am (sappy) as a person. It’s hard to feel that exposed and not feel insecure about what I am doing. Many of the texts are from myself and Michael Cormier, who runs Dear Life. He’s a very close friend so it felt natural to express my doubts to him even though he was also helping to release the record. His support of this record and past work has been astounding and I am immeasurably grateful. It was his idea to include them.

In complete opposition to that doubt is what Cormier describes as your “unyielding faith in loved ones.” Did you set out to make a record dedicated to those people closest to you, or did their love and support bubble to the surface when you confronted themes so honest and intimate?

I think part of this was just the gratitude I feel for the people that are close to me. While working on this record and feeling these songs out I was deeply feeling how much I love my friends. I felt that because I love them so much, I need to also trust that they’ll tell me the truth and not just tell me what I want to hear when it comes to sharing creatively with them. This can be hard for me to do, and is something I’ve tried really hard to work on for myself.

There’s a thread of miscommunication running through the record, something again captured in the text messages in the liner notes. The cliché is that music communicates what can’t be put into words, but I think in this case the sense extends through the music too. Communicating the miscommunication, as it were. A sense of opacity?

Emotion can be hard to express! At least for me anyway. Sometimes I feel like I’m not being clear enough. Or that it’s not getting through or out of me. I think I was trying to express that part of it as well; the frustration and intensity of trying to be earnest in the midst of often crippling anxiety combined with the fact that there’s someone on the other side receiving it with their own ideas/viewpoints/insecurities. There’s a lot that has to be passed through before it reaches a person. Who knows what it’s like when it gets there.

I wanted to ask about the artwork. It’s an image that draws you in the more you view it. There’s so much going on in what is ostensibly plain image. The juxtaposition of the simplicity of the blue on white and the emerging detail of a magnified view. The incompleteness of the zoomed in image too, the invitation to guess at its larger form. Could you talk a little about how it became the artwork for the album?

When it came time to put the artwork together I knew I wanted Francis Lyons to do it. We’ve worked together musically quite a bit and he’s a close friend, and as such feels a part of these songs. I asked him to do the artwork and the first draft he showed me was a printed mock up of the tape with all the extra pages. I had no idea that he was going to go this far with the design and go above and beyond in the way that he did, and I was just blown away. That sense of thoughtfulness and care and daring really feels like a part of the music too, and so naturally it felt perfect. I haven’t asked him too many questions about where the text comes from, or even what the zoomed in image is from, and I’d rather not know. It feels like some kind of secret that he can have, that feels sacred. I trust it’s coming from a heartfelt place; he’s a close friend after all, and that’s enough.

Notebook is out now via Dear Life Records and you can get it from the Jason Calhoun Bandcamp page.

Photo by Benjamin Torrey, artwork by Francis Lyons

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“Lengths were determined by the duration of ten separate field recordings,” Calhoun describes. “From these, the general length and progression were determined, even if the final result did not even include the original recording at all.” The recordings became concept rather than content, acting like vague maps that led him down new paths. As Calhoun puts it “this structure felt like a place to begin.”

But the recordings were more than mere timestamps. Calhoun recorded them on what he describes as “a retreat into nature,” and so Jedidiah consequently became an exploration of humankind’s place in a wider ecosystem, and our place as individuals within the boundless plains of both space and time. “I found myself contemplating the smallness of human age in the context of nature,” Calhoun says. “The joy letting go can bring, and the importance of resisting being swept along by capitalist advancement and destruction.”

A sense of the outdoors is enmeshed throughout Jedidiah. Crunchy footsteps offer the nearest thing the album has to percussion, as on ‘lateral moves’ or the stark and sombre title track, while ‘survey’ is built around the sound of what could either be a scrambling gait or something being stuffed into a backpack. There’s a sense of forward motion too on ‘ego death’, footsteps joined by breaths and sniffs, as if we’re right there, hiking alongside Calhoun. It feels like being invited along on a personal journey, and the glimmering drone that envelops everything adds a poignancy, a sense of wordless rumination on the state of things.

Jedidiah find Calhoun in a pretty gloomy place, which I suppose is to be expected from an album with song titles including ‘buried where you live’ and ‘you die and that’s it’. Indeed, he writes about this idea of “sad music” in a piece for I Heart Noise. “The sort of sadness that I was thinking of when starting this new record felt greater than myself,” he describes in a line which quite succinctly captures the feeling of the entire record. Like all of Calhoun’s music, Jedidiah focuses on he incidental in order to capture the universal. There’s no central tragedy, no hackneyed narrative. Instead, Calhoun expresses something ingrained and indistinct, a sorrow that’s woven into even the simplest, most mundane moments.

But that’s not to say Jedidiah is morose and sullen. There’s something calming about it, reassuring even, a sense of recognition for the distillation of sensations we’re all familiar with. There’s quiet transcendence too, for example around the middle section of closer ‘fields’. As Calhoun puts in the album’s description: “Those close to me have said that this album is perhaps darker than previous works, and they may be correct. Within this sadness, there is still a hope, a sense of gentle wonder for what the future may bring.”

Jedidiah is out now on Dear Life Records and available via Bandcamp.

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Black Sea Dahu – Thaw
Will Henriksen – Nothing Left Behind
Dehd – Letter
Hovvdy – Ruin (my ride)
Maya Lucia – preteen
They Are Gutting A Body of Water – french
Jason Calhoun – moving
Dilary Huff – Overused Sayings
Two Meters – The Nightmare
Dead Painters – Marigold
The Deer – Confetti To The Hurricane
Pastel – Moon Landing
Hit Like A Girl – No More Dysphoria
Basement Revolver – Master’s Degree
Bodies on the Beach – Ghost
Highnoon – Lens
Distant Reader – Marie
Drakes Island – 4 Days
Wet Dream – Worried
Best Mann – Must Be Wrong
The Funs – Trains Across The Sea
Ganser – Buio
Nothings – Favorite Shirt
Corinne Sharlet – Hail Mary
ahem – Halloween
Max and the Martians – Please Hold On
A.S. Wilson – Taken Apart
Béret – Book of Hera
Joel Jerome – There’s Nothing Here To Bother You Anymore
Carpet City – Little Longer
Hannah Cranton – Kite
Zachary Lucky – Didn’t Know That You’d Come Along
Wintersleep – Fading Out
Coral – find me wrong
Boo Baby – “Jazz?”
Margaux – Palm

Check out our previous Monthly Roundup playlists, and be sure to read our Reviews and Previews throughout the month.

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As with prior releases, that slow part is important. Calhoun makes music as patient and imperfect as the world around us. These are songs crafted from thick welcoming textures and a quiet cacophony of thuds and clicks, at once richly detailed and strangely spare, as if Calhoun is holding up a microphone to the hidden corners of the world, all dust motes and creaking beams and pale lemon sunlight. Practice is “as much an album to listen to as a room to inhabit,” reads the apt description from Lily Tapes, “the details are all right in front of you, but you take them in differently as the world turns, as the light on the wall shifts and fades.”

Songs like ‘labor day’, based around a recording of gently lapping water, have a calmness and a brightness at their core which is hard to describe, the background atmosphere sounding at once melancholy and affirming, like jubilant swells of church organ drifting in from a distance. ‘string’ does something similar with the swish of passing traffic, a beautiful collection of tones and textures that highlight the magic in the mundane of our everyday lives.

But if that’s the kind of thing we’ve come to know and love from Calhoun, practice holds some surprises too. Beginning in a crackling hiss that could be a campfire or a wordless phonecall, ‘route’ patiently unfurls across its eight minute run-time, the subtle ambient recordings anchored by emotive atmospherics. But perhaps the most notable example is finale ‘moving’, which immediately bursts to life in a shimmering blast of noise. The key elements remain, you can still hear the organic hiss and staticky glitches, the slow-aching drones, but it sounds more immediate and, well, louder. Of course, the dramatic is relative, there are still no crashing cymbals or wailing guitars, but by the time the track begins to wane towards its close, you feel like you’ve seen a glimpse of the evolution of Jason Calhoun.

practice is out now and you can get it on cassette from Lily Tapes & Discs, or from the Jason Calhoun Bandcamp page.

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However, while the album is united by a certain mellowness, to label it one-paced would be to do it a disservice. Opener ‘Beautiful, OH’ is a sparse, elegiac number underpinned by the gentlest swells, the cyclical pattern interspersed with irregular rises in tempo which never quite culminate in anything like a climax, playing like time passing across a landscape. This is followed by ‘The Carter Starter’, a track positively chirpy in comparison, though violin still sweeps across at various interludes to add a wistful dimension. ‘Still New To This’ creeps out of its beginnings with a playful edge. The cyclical motif utilised once more, though each iteration is altered and built upon so that a sense of organic life is imparted to the flow.

As highlighted in the next three tracks, much of Tiny Houses is pitched somewhere between insular and expansive, the echo and hum suggesting loneliness, though one which could apply to a crowded room or wide open plain. Put another way, the sadness Hour conjure could be either external or internal—a mindful person living within a lonely space, or a lonely person trying to feel more at home within an indifferent one. “This collection of songs explores the cracks and crevices of the spaces we occupy and call home,” the press release explains. “Each song balances the transcendence and claustrophobia that can come with sharing those spaces with others, and the decision, at times liberating, at times painful, to leave and start the process over again.”

With its more insistent percussion and experimental sound, ‘Town Meeting’ has a disorientating undercurrent, the intermittent field recordings of wordless babble adding to the perturbed vibe. Samples are a key part of the title track too, with subtle birdsong and the great rush of wind filling out the background of the simple acoustic sound. The ambient hiss of this track continues onto the grand, slow-burning ‘Doxology’—the most cinematic, post-rock inspired song on the record, bringing to mind talons’ minus the lyrics.

The album is closed by ‘From a Bus Window in Central Ohio, Just Before a Thunder Shower,’ and the sincere preciseness of the title is a good indicator of the sound. Again, the song emerges in gentle waves, a naturalistic patience that eventually rises into some of the most affirming moments on the record. As a finale, it feels like a message of sorts, Hour’s insistence that there can be value and meaning within the simplest of things, beauty within quiet calm, a home within any place, no matter how great or small.

Tiny Houses is out now on Sleeper Records and you can get it from Bandcamp. Also, Hour recently put out three videos which, speaking to The Line of Best Fit, Cormier describes as “attempts at capturing slices of three distinct artistic lives and visions, in process and imperfect, connected by songs from the latest Hour release.” Check them out on Youtube:

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This sets the tone for the rest of the album, the sombre vibe contrasted with moments of small beauty that make you stop and stare and smile despite yourself. ‘Clouds’ is propped up by the calming nostalgia of a gentle tide, while ‘Headache’ and ‘Relax’ flutter with a soft glow, electronic buzzes and beeps washed beneath a bittersweet sensation that can’t quite be translated into words. It’s something to do with a balance between good and bad, longing desperately for something while simultaneously harbouring the quiet belief it might just come true. Closer ‘Nothing’, by far the longest track on the album, captures this perfectly. Woven from the kind of melancholy you experience when looking out over some impressive view, the song holds a strange joyful sadness you can wrap close to your body as a reminder that you are alive.

Happy All The Time Forever Always is out now and you can buy it from the Bridgetown Records Bandcamp page or their website, or get a name-your-price download via the naps Bandcamp page.

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