“Recorded while the Canadian songwriter was pregnant and unsurprisingly explor[ing] motherhood,” we wrote of Abigail Lapell‘s forthcoming album Shadow Child, “the tracks emerged stripped back and stark, a stylistic move at least in part dictated by Lapell’s difficult experiences with IVF and miscarriage that comes to paint the journey to parenthood in all of its too-often unspoken truth.” After singles ‘Hazel’ (“soothes and mourns in equal measure, addressed to the existentially vague child, be they in the womb, the future or memory”) and the title track, Lapell has now shared latest single ‘So Long’ ahead of the album’s release this May via Outside Music. This time welcoming BC songwriter Pharis Romero in support, the track displays the maritime imagery which runs through the record, and explores love as something both elemental and haunting.

So long, my love, so long
Out upon the great dark sea
How long, my love, how long
How long away will you be?

Watch the video by FITDG, Fernando Iannicelli, below:

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

Fugue State – So What Is There?

“A shape-shifting track which shimmers with a beguiling cyclical, or rather spiral, rhythm, constantly circling itself while still moving towards new ground.” That’s we described ‘Dark‘, the previous single from Fugue State‘s upcoming album, After Nothing Comes. An example of the unique approach Dan Langa and his collaborators took for the album, a process which blurs the distinction between solo and ensemble, composition and improvisation, as well as the human and the digital. As we continued: “once the ‘human’ element is complete, Langa and co. take the recordings and pass them through a myriad of digital manipulations, sampling, distorting and re-harmonising the sounds into strange echoes of themselves.” With the album now little over a month away, Fugue State has shared latest single ‘So What Is There?’ to further introduce these techniques, and highlight the contribution of Javanese singer, composer and educator Peni Candra Rini, who left a significant mark on the record after spending a day recording with Langa at the Figure 8 Studio. “That session with Peni ultimately shaped the sequencing of the record,” he describes. “Her presence offers potent moments of respite within an often dense, maximalist soundworld.”

Garet Camella – Balance

LA-based singer-songwriter Garet Camella spent the best part of a decade in the indie rock band Indigo Wild, but in the last few years has gone back to his roots, writing and recording under his own name. A couple of years ago he released Mont Michel Archives, a collection of demos and older songs that he had discarded. The release felt like finding an old box of polaroid photographs, snapshots of previous times and places made all the more evocative by the light leaks and specks of dust. Now Camella is about to return with a new EP, Just Passing Through, which resurrects five songs from his past, this time with an extra layer of polish. After first taste ‘Gnats‘, new single ‘Balance’ further introduces the release, an earnest indie rock song that hits like a breath of fresh air with it’s hopeful driving momentum and heart-on-sleeve momentum. Fans of the mid-2000s indie rock golden age will find lots to like for sure.

Hadnot Creek – A River of Love

The recording project of Charlottesville songwriter Robert Sawrey and an ever-changing array of collaborators including Ben Laderberg (Kendall Street Company), Zach Samel, Lee Sargent and Tyler Sargent (former members of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), Colin Lagenus (USA is a Monster), Austin Patterson and Jimmy Williams, Hadnot Creek has established itself as a prolific, personality-filled vehicle for good old fashioned outsider folk music. Sawrey and co. are preparing to release the project’s sixth full-length The End of the Road this June, and single ‘A River of Love’ indicates the record will continue this authentic, idiosyncratic style with equal parts heart and invention. Fans of the likes of James McMurty are sure to find much to love, Hadnot Creek sketching a decidedly existential picture of life and death without losing a toe-tapping rhythm.

Jillian Lake – Apple

Vancouver-based songwriter Jillian Lake has been releasing a number of singles in recent times, from ‘Cold Where You Are‘ (a single “equally attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull”) and ‘Human‘ (“an intensely personal song which reckons with the self in the most intimate way possible, displaying Lake’s turn towards richer arrangements while still evoking the austere stillness of an empty room”). All in preparation for the release of her second release, Is All This Mess Mine?. The EP, now released, “is a project about stopping and looking around at all the chaos around and wondering how I got stuck right in the middle of all of it,” Lake explains. “This collection of songs are all different realizations about myself and the way my mind works, the way I react, the way I feel, the way I get stuck, and all the messy bits.” Latest single ‘Apple’ offers Lake at perhaps her rawest yet, using the image of spoiled fruit to delve into feelings of expendability within a relationship. “Apple came from a place of feeling disposable,” Lake continues. “Like someone had already decided you weren’t worth keeping, and you’d started to believe them.”

Is All This Mess Mine? is out now and available via streaming services.

Leah Senior – Mothersong

Naarm/Melbourne-based “folk diviner” Leah Senior has built a considerable following over the last ten years, releasing four albums and sharing stages internationally with the likes of Wilco, Jessica Pratt and Iron & Wine. In June, she will release new record Pt. Roadknight via Third Eye Stimuli (Australia) and SPINSTER (USA), a collection of 70s-style pastoral folk and psych-tinged pop songs that explore the natural world and the variety of ways we interact with it. Lead single ‘Mothersong’ is a great introduction. Written “to ease a friend’s anxiety as she transitioned into motherhood,” this is a bright and vibrant folk pop song that’s nevertheless wrapped in a healthy dose of British backcountry weirdness, gazing back fifty years or so to a time that itself was looking back toward much older traditions. Check the very apt video below:

Pt. Roadknight is due for release on 19^th June. Pre-order it now from the Leah Senior Bandcamp page.

Ruth Garbus – I Think I’m Ready Now

Ruth Garbus has announced her new LP Profound will be released this June via Orindal Records. It’s the follow-up to previous full-lengths Kleinmeister (2019) and Alive People (2023), and it seems the album will continue the journey set out across its predecessors. Kleinmeister presented “the environment as a museum of trash,” we wrote in our review, a state which mirrored Garbus’s frame of mind. A “great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience,” we continued, “the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.” While Alive People felt like an attempt to reach through or beyond this mess, reflecting on, among other things, “creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality.” But Profound seems to have taken several steps further. More assured in tone and execution, newly willing or able to communicate directly, audaciously, and, yes, happily. The title of opener and lead single ‘I Think I’m Ready Now’ sets the tone, a song about relinquishing a certain degree of control over art so that it might emerge more easily and authentically.

Breathing where the dragon is hiding is a lucky game
In the pink of your surroundings you can let go of shame
The lemon drops of failure all dissolve
And the sick of sweet pretending just a veil of gauze

Watch the visualizer made by Garbus herself below:

Profound will be released on the 12th June via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now.

Sasha Adrian – Always, Almost

Based in Copenhagen, Sasha Adrian makes emotive indie pop songs that combine diary-like earnestness and wryly humorous cynicism. She already has two EPs to her name, 2023’s Token and 2024’s Shell, and is now “stepping into her debut album era” with new single ‘Always, Almost’. It’s a love song, but not in the conventional sense. Focusing on a relationship that has run its course (and then some), it finds a narrator stuck between the immediate heartache of breaking things off and the slower, self-deceptive suffering of holding onto something that is already dead. It’s catchy, sassy and sad, delving into a messy life with gentle sincerity and blunt candour. “Oh it’s so easy to conflate longing with love,” as she sings, “It’s time I learned to separate wanting and not.”

Suzanne Vallie – River of Angels Wings

Suzanne Vallie began work on her new record, Moonshiner Springs, during a very difficult time. Dealing with both chronic illness and grief following the death of her father, she grew increasingly weak and isolated. “It occurred to me I should document my new songs while I had the strength to do it,” she says on her decision to record demos at home on an old Panasonic tape recorder. She shared some of these songs online, and thus began a period of revitalization. Old friends and new began to send encouragement, and as Vallie puts it “my gumption got amped and my medicine kicked-in.” She enlisted the help of Carly Bond and Mat Davidson, and together they created something special. “Moonshiner Springs is an album created by the illumination and gifts born in times of grief and frailty,” Vallie describes. “As steady as hardship arrives, so too comes friendship, flying to the rescue.” Lead single and opener ‘River of Angels Wings’ is an early glimpse, the perfect introduction to the record’s bewitching atmosphere.

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In February we previewed Shadow Child, the latest album from Abigail Lapell which was recorded while the Canadian songwriter was pregnant and unsurprisingly explores motherhood. “The tracks emerged stripped back and stark,” we wrote, “a stylistic move at least in part dictated by Lapell’s difficult experiences with IVF and miscarriage that comes to paint the journey to parenthood in all of its too-often unspoken truth.” With the release fast approaching, Lapell has shared the title track along with a video to further introduce this style. “I recently found all my old super 8 films, and I thought this odd little black and white claymation might fit well with ‘Shadow Child’, a song about pregnancy and childbirth – creation and transformation,” she explains. “But when I actually tried pairing the two, it was crazy. The unedited ‘backwards’ visuals fit the song exactly perfectly – like down to the second. Complete with the final reveal of the figure’s shadow, and then my own hands in silhouette, returning it to a formless blob. I couldn’t believe it.”

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

Air Mail – Won’t You

Following on from singles ‘Wide Awake (a.m.)’ (“uses a melodic and melancholic style to explore the strange sensation of being faced with disaster at a distance”) and ‘Moss Song’ (“its warm tones and languid rhythms allowing in the outside environment, playing like spring blooming in real time”), Niko Francis’s Air Mail has unveiled debut LP a.m. Continental with latest track ‘Won’t You’. Again falling somewhere between Lenderman-esque alt country and the sun-drenched pop of acts likes Cut Worms, the track explores the sensation of a relationship being slowly dismantled by forces beyond anyone’s control. It meditates not only on the pain of a separation but the enduring fondness that survives beyond physical remove. “As long as words are sincere / and what you want is clear,”  Francis sings in the first verse, “as long as you still feel near, even when you’re far from here / won’t you stay and love me?”

Ben Auld – Red Bandana

This May, Norwich-based artist Ben Auld will release Loserdom, a brand new album via Safe Suburban Home and Repeating Cloud which signals something of a sea change. Whereas Auld’s previous work tended towards the twee end of indie folk, the new record draws on influences like Tony Molina and Teenage Fanclub to offer loud, scrappy and spirited style of power pop. Lead single ‘Red Bandana’ heralds this new sound, as well as the mix of unabashed sincerity and tongue-in-cheek charm which marks his writing. “I was trying to write something that captured the explosive pang that can happen when you reflect on places you’ve lived and people you’ve known,” Auld explains of the single. “That sudden reminder of a life you used to have, the impossibility of returning to it, and the pain of living in the past.”

Frog – Je Nes Sais Pas

When cult favourites Frog put out their 1000 Variations of the Same Song album last year, we didn’t think they were actually aiming for the big four figures. But follow-up The Count arrived hot on the heels of its predecessor and now the New York outfit are already gearing up to release the third full-length in the cycle, Frog for Sale. Described as an album “about how money sometimes gets in the way of love,” the record sees the Bateman brothers take inspiration from the likes of Buddy Holly and Paul McCartney, again switching up the Frog sound while maintaining that idiosyncratic charm that’s made them so beloved. Lead single ‘Je Nes Sais Pas’ is available now, a track of bright energy and fading dreams, not to mention a trademark wit and humour. “You’re just no good anymore since you went away and didn’t darken any door,” as Bateman sings in one typical verse. “Now you got your hair like Anna Wintour except poor.”

Jillian Lake – Human

“Attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull, namely the strange tension of watching a loved one attempt to navigate a difficult period, willing more than anything to save them from the turmoil but conscious of being dragged into the mire yourself.” So we wrote of ‘Cold Where You Are’ by Jillian Lake last month, a single which embodies the balance between compassion and suffering which marks the Vancouver-based songwriter’s work. Now Lake has shared brand new single ‘Human’ and this balance has never been more evident. It’s an intensely personal song which reckons with the self in the most intimate way possible, displaying Lake’s turn towards richer arrangements while still evoking the austere stillness of an empty room. A place where there is nowhere to look but inwards, no matter how uncomfortable. “’Human’ is a song I wrote about the fear that you’re losing pieces of yourself, and starting to not recognize yourself,” Lake explains. “I remember the first time I saw the Eiffel tower I was so amazed and astonished. When I went back to Paris years later I just stared at it and didn’t really feel anything. It scared me that I lost that sense of wonder. I missed the old version of myself.”

‘Human’ is out now via streaming services.

Matthew Squires & Sunk Coast – Wing Song

We’ve followed the idiosyncratic, ever-inventive songwriting of Matthew Squires for a number of years now, from his ‘Ballad of Norm MacDonald‘ and quasi-cover ‘Poor Men Southeast of Portland‘ to ‘Song of a Cactus‘ in 2024. Now, having moved to Ithaca, New York, Squires has teamed up with Zach Totta of Sunk Coast for a new track, and the result is no less distinctive. With vocals that rival Daniel Johnston in their ability to echo Kermit the Frog, the song is classic Matthew Squires, proving that genuinely compassionate music need not leave playfulness or strangeness at the door. “In the face of the absurd, it’s there I’ll find my answer,” he sings in one fitting verse, “I’ll decode the hidden words inside the movements of a dancer: / It’s the story of a king who forgot if he has merit / He sprouts himself some wings and then he sings ‘til all can hear it.”

Old Amica – Bländverk

“A record which explores time with Old Amica’s signature care and patience […] suspended in a negative space seemingly disconnected from anything tangible, memories floating by in abstract grace.” That’s how we described the Swedish duo’s album För alltid back in 2024, again noting how their blend of organic and digital sensibilities manages to evoke memory in all of its emotional depth. With a new full-length set for release next month via Whitelabrecs, Old Amica are now back with ‘Bländverk’, a spare piano-based track that again explores the poignant, often ethereal world of recollection. Stretched across ten minutes, the song mimics the gauzy filter memory can bring, where the reality of a moment is softened, a monument worn smooth by the passing of time.

Sulka – All Bets Off

This summer Glasgow-based songwriter Lukas Clasen, AKA Sulka, will release new full-length Bute on Lost Map and No Soap Records. Following last year’s single ‘Halloween’, that as we said previously combined “subdued vocals with an eerie backdrop of distorted guitars and synths,” he has now released a second track from the album to further whet appetites. Titled ‘All Bets Off’, it’s an ostensibly charming indie pop song that nevertheless delves into a toxic relationship. And not your average one either. Written from an equine perspective, it explores the exploitation at the heart of horse racing. “The song was partly inspired by a storyline in the TV show The Sopranos, where Tony buys a race horse and develops a genuine love for it,” Clasen explains. “I thought writing a song from the horse’s perspective would make an interesting device for exploring the ups and downs of a volatile relationship”

Tory Silver – Microwave

Pittsburgh-based Tory Silver makes a brand of indie rock that she says “[channels] the small joys and inevitable uncertainties of residing in a body.” She has a new record, In Through the Front with Lasers, coming at the end of May via Michi Tapes and has unveiled new single ‘Microwave’ in anticipation. The song is set in the cold chill of dawn, our narrator sat bleary-eyed in their kitchen, enjoying the quiet ahead of a day of selling their body for what Silver describes in an Instagram post as a “silly grocery job under crapitalism.” There’s a healthy does of existential dread sure, but there’s also enough garage rock crunch for it to feel rousing too. An anthem for the masses forced to drag themselves out of bed every morning to keep on keeping on.

Scrambled eggs
On my plate
Getting cold
Microwave

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Now Jillian Lake has returned with ‘Cold Where You Are’, a brand new single equally attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull. Namely the strange tension of watching a loved one attempt to navigate a difficult period, willing more than anything to save them from the turmoil but conscious of being dragged into the mire yourself. “It’s cold in the water,” Lake sings in the refrain, “It’s cold where you are.” These lines underscore the distance and remove of that other person, even when delivered with such compassion and empathy. Again, it is this tension which marks the Jillian Lake sound. Between the heaviness of life’s struggles and the emotional warmth which tries to see us through. Watch the visualizer shot and directed by Lauren Kurc below:

‘Cold Where You Are’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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Back in May we introduced Part Of The Problem, Baby, the new full-length from Fortitude Valley coming this August on Specialist Subject Records, with single ‘Sunshine State‘. “A track which finds [lead Laura] Kovac addressing her younger self,” we described, “delving into the person she was before and during her move from Brisbane to the UK, and how the competing desires for home and escape never really go away.” With the album’s release edging closer, Fortitude Valley are back with new track ‘Video (Right There With You)’. “The song is about trying to get inside the head of someone you love, and how hard it can be surviving together in what feels like an increasingly hostile and scary world,” Kovic explains. “It also plays into the central theme of the album, which is about feeling distant from people you care about, both literally and figuratively.”

Watch the video directed by Stuart Laws below, shot as the band performed at the Machynlleth Comedy Fest and starring comedian Celya AB.

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

 French for Rabbits – Gold and Blue

Ahead of the Matariki holiday and an upcoming winter tour around Aotearoa, Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington-based outfit French for Rabbits have returned with brand new standalone single, ‘Gold and Blue’. Written by lead Brooke Singer in a prolific period before the birth of her son, the track meditates on the future and the mysterious ways in which it realises itself, be it through chance, fate or an intuitive reaching forward. The song comes complete with a video by director Martin Sagadin and cinematographer Bill Bycroft. “For the video, we wanted to throw the listener through time and space,” Singer explains, “feel a gasp for breath as they tumble them through the present and past to moments of change, connection, and fluctuation.”

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

Glenn Echo – Give + Take

The project of Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist Matt Gaydar, Glenn Echo is an outlet for patient and introspective folk music. Gaydar has just released a new Glenn Echo EP, No Believer, a collection of five songs recorded with help from Will Stratton that showcase this style perfectly. Second track ‘Give + Take is perhaps the standout, opening with the warm country croon of guitar before settling into a slow, contemplative momentum. “Been driving away, over the county line,” Gaydar sings in the opening line which immediately captures the song’s sense of night-time hush, “past the firehouse, all through the night, blind driving, silent.”

Jess Kerber – Tropical Storm

We’ve written about a number of singles from Jess Kerber‘s debut album From Way Down Here in recent months, describing how the Nashville-based songwriter melds traditional folk and contemporary electronic sensibilities to bring her emotive style to life. ‘Next to You’ rose from a dreamy haze to clarity, while ‘Never Again’ introduced the themes of loss and belonging so central to the record. With the album now out via Felte Records, Kerber has released latest single ‘Tropical Storm’. Another poignant, wistful slice of nostalgic longing, rooted in the specific imagery of memories as imprinted on the young mind. Watch the video edited by Kerber herself below:

From Way Down Here is out now via Felte Records and available from the Jess Kerber Bandcamp page.

Jeffrey Martin – Edge of Lost

With albums like One Go Around and Thank God We Left The Garden, Portland, Oregon songwriter Jeffrey Martin has developed an evocative brand of folk concerned with both the personal and the societal, centring the classic Americana style within the unique circumstances of the present (“The climate is collapsing, diseases rising, robots striving to take over the globe, and still there’s not enough money for the people who actually need it,” as we wrote of the latter album, “still the future holds a distant promise, the past haunts with its glory and regret”). Out via Fluff and Gravy Records, new single ‘Edge of Lost’ is every bit as heartfelt and urgent. Inspired by Davey Schaupp’s No Place to Grow Old, a documentary interviewing people experiencing homelessness or the threat of it across Portland, the song explores the strange contradictions of such a life. Where existence is at once heavier than it should be yet also translucently thin, the eyes of society sliding past as you though barely exist at all. “I tried to capture the chasm between the housed and unhoused,” Martin explains, “and how the psychological burden of that divide is a very difficult thing to hold as people try to navigate their way out of homelessness.”

Jillian Lake – Tactile

“There’s a city in my head,” sings Jillian Lake on latest single ‘Tactile’, a line repeated across the track in what might be warning or explanation. Based in Vancouver, the singer-songwriter has made a name with intimate, personal folk songs, though has increasingly pushed her sound into richer, more urgent territory without sacrificing any of the heartfelt charm. The new single is a lesson in how effective such a combination can be. Indeed, the refrain can be held as a key to the song’s spirit, presenting an exploration of grief in all of its complexity, an emotional landscape as bustling, nuanced and contradictory as any urban space. ‘Tactile’ is about how grief is this invisible and intangible thing that is so hard to navigate,” Lake explains. “A scraped knee, a black eye, a broken arm—is so much easier to make sense of than something you can’t pinpoint. Something you can’t bandage or brace.”

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

Jouska – Flower Moon

Jouska is the recording project of  Norwegian songwriter and producer Marit Othilie Thorvik. Originally a duo, the project started out making pop-orientated electronic music, but now that it’s Thorvik alone, the atmosphere has evolved into something more intimate and introspective. New single ‘Flower Moon’, Jouska’s first since 2023 record Suddenly My Mind Is Blank, leans into dream pop dimension of the project to invoke a sense of detachment, the vocals drifting through a wash of ethereal tones as though untethered yet longing for solid ground. “I was anxious,” as Thorvik explains, “distracted by things at home. Physically in one place, emotionally somewhere else, missing out on both.”

múm – Mild At Heart

Icelandic experimental royalty múm have established themselves as one of the most interesting and atmospheric projects since their inception in the nineties, each of the six previous albums building upon the last while always exploring new territory. Their first full-length in over ten years, History of Silence finds the band as ambitious as ever. An album “recorded, deconstructed, put back together again, refined and finished over the course of two years,” the release blends electronic and analogue sounds to explore ideas of distance in our fast-changing world, the songs rejecting linear progress to instead embrace tangents and digressions. Take the way lead single ‘Mild at Heart’ shifts and drifts across its length, a controlled, ever-curious track that shows the power of understatement while also reaching towards new ground.

Watch the video filmed & edited by Sigurlaug Gísladóttir below:

History of Silence will be released via Morr Music on 15th September. Pre-order it now from Bandcamp.

The Noisy – Twos

Back in 2024 Philly dream pop outfit The Noisy released The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, an album written for and funded by the queer community which served as a celebration of their kinship, performance, joyous excesses and plurity. Now The Noisy are preparing to release a deluxe version of the record via Audio Antihero, appropriately titled The Secret Ingredient is Even More Meat, offering reimagined versions of the songs. Single ‘Twos’ and its gloriously cinematic video by Sam Cush indicates the new direction they take. “I wrote this song like a pop song but wanted the production to bend towards Mannequin Pussy with sludgy guitars and twinkly keys,” frontperson Sara Mae Henke explains. “The music video literalizes the too much-ness of the story, Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Grey Gardens meets two dates to the prom.”

‘Twos’ is out now via Audio Antihero and available from Bandcamp.

Tyler Bradley Walker – Because of the Many

We introduced The Sun The Moon The Earth and Me, the debut solo album from Tyler Bradley Walker, back in May, describing how the artist best known as one half of electronic rock duo Gone to Color was every bit as ambitious and adventurous in his solo work. ” Single ‘Moon Broke Quiet’ offered “a spacious, evocative soundscape which seems to sit at an angle to reality,” we wrote, “everything a little stark and surreal and strange […] occup[ying] that nocturnal liminal space between waking life and dreams.” With the album now out, TBW has shared opening track ‘Because of the Many’ as a new single, an experimental pop protest song that takes aim at modern day USA. The track’s idiosyncrasy and slow-burn intensity is intensified with a video every bit as odd.

Out gunned, not done
The fucking light is green
No one eats their eggs that way
Wise man funny man
Write your own story
Very large worlds untouched untouched

Watch the video directed by Andrew Petersson and produced By Carson Cox (Mod Visual) below:

The Sun The Moon The Earth and Me is out now and available to purchase from the Tyler Bradley Walker Bandcamp page.

Will Orchard – Something’s Gotta Go

If you’ve been reading VSF over the last few months, you may know that Nashville-via-New England songwriter Will Orchard has a new record, Behind the Shadow Glass, coming out later this year. The initial two singles ‘Down’ and ‘Nothing Fog’ gave a pretty good idea of what to expect, and now we have a third cut to further whet appetites. Titled ‘Something’s Gotta Go’, the song finds Orchard with his sleeves rolled up as he digs through the dirt. Crunchy Americana meets Neil Young folk rock which sees him picks through internal knots and tangles that have been tripping him up over the years. “[The song] is a cathartic release, and an acknowledgement of self-inflicted pain.” Orchard describes. “It’s about getting into the pattern of never being satisfied with yourself. Calling the song finished was somewhat of a challenge because of how raw and in some ways, non-poetic it felt. But that’s the spirit of the song, just putting it all out there and letting go of your will to try so hard.”

Wombo – Neon Bog

“Feeling every inch the product of a band nearing ten years together, [Danger in Fives] finds the Wombo sound realised in its purest form,” we wrote of the Louisville trio’s new album coming later this summer on Fire Talk Records, “combining the experimentation and risk-taking which marked their earlier releases with the growing confidence so evident on Fairy Rust. That is, the sound of project which has come to understand its spirit and ambitions and is now committing to them with total conviction.” Latest single ‘Neon Bog’ shows just how deep such conviction runs, the band embracing happenstance and happy accidents during the recording process to create something as atmospheric as it is idiosyncratic.

The song comes complete with a video directed by Cameron Lowe along with assistant director Scotty “Sleepy” Anderson. The film leans further into the haunting tones of the song, using practical effects a la Michel Gondry. “I’ve been watching a lot of the TV show Ghost Adventures and have been somewhat haunted by the implications of the paranormal,” as Lowe explains. “I thought the video was a good outlet for expressing that in an abstract way.”

Danger in Fives is out on the 8th August via Fire Talk and you can pre-order it now from the Wombo Bandcamp page.

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