“Are you so bored, or just boring?” asks American Cream Band‘s Nathan Nelson on ‘Don’t Burn the House Down’, the latest single from their new full-length Twin, coming next month via Quindi Records. A repeated refrain dripping in sardonic wit and clearly pointed towards the malicious forces currently extending their tentacles across the US and beyond. Based in the Twin Cities, Nelson and co. have experienced the blunt end of contemporary fascism in recent months, something which charges the new record with an almost electric urgency, as ‘Don’t Burn the House Down’ attests. A rich, colourful and caustic track which stands its ground against those who would destroy the places we call home if given half a chance.

Aubrey Jane – Karmic

Next week, New Orleans-based songwriter Aubrey Jane will release Starshiner, a new full-length album which builds upon the foundations of previous release Calamity, using vulnerability and emotional honesty to move beyond difficult experiences and towards something new. Latest single ‘Karmic’ is the ideal entry point, demonstrating Jane’s mix of folk-inflected brand of indie rock and the confessional bedroom pop sensibilities which underpin it. Flowing between relative restraint and urgent peaks of intensity, the track confronts a dysfunctional relationship head on, probing at the parts at hurt with an almost masochistic compulsion. “And I’ll play the victim / Cause I’ve always been good at it,” as Janes sings:

Wait till you have the words to tell me
What I did
Maybe all this is karmic
Maybe it’s deserved
So I’ll be the bad guy if you be the damsel
Cause I like how it hurts

Watch the video filmed, produced, directed and edited by Quinn Young below:

‘Karmic’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. Starshiner will be released on the 15th May.

Félicia Atkinson – Les Yeux II

Ghent’s VIERNULVIER runs a series called VIDEOROOM, where classic cult films are shown with new live soundtracks, with 2026’s programme featuring the likes of Mary Lattimore playing a score for Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy and Alabaster DePlume doing Peter Kass’s Time of the Heathen. Félicia Atkinson‘s new album SANS VISAGE stems from the project, taking the reimagined soundtrack for Georges Franju’s 1960 horror classic Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face) she performed live and condensing it into a continuous, non-linear composition. One which considers the “female and animal gaze” of the film, repositioning the focus towards the resistance displayed by the victims to open up a feminist counter-narrative, and ultimately working to show how old art might offer sites to imagine new ideas. Listen to first cut ‘Les Yeux II’ now:

J.W. Ricci – Through a Frame

Though Through a Frame / Pollen Drop is the debut solo guitar released from J.W. Ricci, the double single is far from the first time the North Carolina-based songwriter has attempted to put his music into the world. He spent the best part of the last decade playing in various bands to different levels of success, all while working a series of underpaid, exploitative (and sometimes downright dangerous) jobs, though ultimately emerged feeling discouraged and burnt out having been chewed up on either side by twin meat grinders of the music industry and life. But fast-forward to the present, armed with stable employment and some sense of perspective, Ricci has turned to writing instrumental guitar songs which speak to a new creative headspace. “I feel a sense of spaciousness, ease and openness in those pieces,” he explains, “in contrast to the white-knuckled, clenched, grasping that I hear in my older music.” There’s an clear sense of authenticity to Through a Frame / Pollen Drop as a result, each track recorded live with no overdubs and feeling like an artist not only reflecting on their journey to the present, but also coming to understand a healthier path they might follow from here on in.

Watch the video by Emma Geiger for ‘Through a Frame’ below:

Through a Frame / Pollen Drop is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Laura Lucas & Luke Sital-Singh – Same World

Described as the closest Winnipeg-based songwriter Laura Lucas has ever come to penning a love song, ‘Same World’ was a single on her 2025 debut There’s a Place I Go. A track which turned to the beauty of the organic world as an allegory for human connection, equating the symbiotic bonds of nature to the mutual benefits of a loving relationship. “The first verse of the song is one of my favourite things I’ve written,” she explains. “The line ‘I’ll use your light after you go’ is basically saying ‘I will photosynthesise off of you’, which I think is what falling in love is meant to feel like, like they are the sun and you are the leaf.” But Lucas was not quite finished with the song, and has now returned with an alternate version recorded with Luke Sital-Singh. The essence of the original is preserved, but the addition of an extra voice only accentuates the tenderness and romance.

And I think we live in the same world
And I’ll wait for a sign
Think my nature is something like yours
And yours something like mine, mine

Lemoncello – Tomorrow Nostalgia

In recent weeks we’ve shared a couple of singles from Perfect Place, a full-length from Dublin duo Lemoncello which sees Laura Quirke (guitar/vocals) and Claire Kinsella (cello/vocals) adopt a newfound clarity and emotional honesty within their work. First came ‘Meet Me Halfway’, a song featuring “a complicated relationship between intimacy and distance,” as we wrote, “a sense of push and pull,” then ‘Articulate Animal’, which was “something like a mantra,” as we put it, “a spell intended to cut to the quick of the self, hurdling over the rational part of the mind and sinking into the instinctive.” With the album now out with Claddagh Records, the pair have shared new single ‘Tomorrow Nostalgia’ to further convince audiences of their talents. With a combination of taut, almost brooding tones and altogether more ethereal textures, the song faces up to the dangers of our preoccupations with both the future and past, where the seductive urge to fill a life with dreams of either results in not much of a life at all. Watch the video directed by Eilís Doherty below:

Perfect Place is out now via Claddagh Records and you can get it from Bandcamp.

Max Knouse – Angel’s Share

“The title Goat Pupil could be aspirational, like a name for a student of greatness,” explains Max Knouse of his new record, coming next month via Ruination Record Co., though the LA-based artist offers a number of alternate reads too. “It could be something about seeing in widescreen—goats have amazing rectangular pupils. Or it could be a self-deterministic thing. Goats are pretty Satanic. I like the paradox of following someone who follows no one. There’s a lot of stuff in the songs about harnessing your own powers of evil or about perseverance while witnessing the evil around you.” Following hot on the heels of 2025’s Chimpmunk’d Away, Goat Pupil is itself a story of perseverance. An album created under considerable financial constraints (which, of course, equates considerable practical constraints), that, with help of producer Chris Schlarb, somehow manages to twist this fact to its benefit. How long does it take to capture lightning in a bottle? Judging by this, it takes exactly a day and half in a studio above an Arizona pizza shop. Listen to the lonesome, languorous lead single ‘Angel’s Share’ for an early preview:

Rowena Wise – Blood Ties

Naarm/Melbourne-based songwriter Rowena Wise won acclaim back in 2024 with Senseless Acts of Beauty, an album which drew as much from the classic folk of the sixties as it did contemporaries like Aldous Harding and Julia Jacklin to create a sound able to explore the difficult themes of loss, longing and alienation with an ever-burning compassion and warmth. New single ‘Blood Ties’ continues to develop this style, using a steely yet earnest tone to confront pain head on, and emerging with the possibility that suffering might be conquered if we could look at it honestly. “I wrote ‘Blood Ties’ after a close friend experienced a mental health crisis,” Wise explains. “In the aftermath, I watched his father struggle to respond, not because he didn’t love his son, but because he didn’t know how to meet him emotionally… In Australia, especially, emotional restraint has long been normalised… But that silence creates space for shame to grow, particularly within families where unspoken pain lingers beneath the surface.”

Watch the video directed by Didirri below:

‘Blood Ties’ is out now via Beloved Recordings (Australia) and Dalliance Recordings (rest of the world) and available from Bandcamp.

Trivial Shields – First Edition Paperbacks

Having cut his teeth with college band My Dear Disco, Christian Carpenter has gone on to play with the likes of Renata Zeiguer, Luke Winslow-King, Kent Odessa, Anna Ash and Cassandra Jenkins, though has also built up a considerable catalogue of his own work under the moniker Trivial Shields. Recorded analog to tape at the renowned Tiny Telephone studio in Oakland, latest single ‘First Edition Paperbacks’ is the ideal introduction for anyone unfamiliar with the project. The tale of two relationships which come to mirror one another (one with a bookseller, another with an experimental ‘plant musician’), both enthralling the narrator despite (or perhaps because of) proving somewhat unobtainable in the grand scheme of things.  “Living off of manic lust in excess / Eating from your supple hands,” Carpenter croons in typically passionate fashion. “When brilliant minds / antagonize / Is there fault to contest? / I don’t know but…” The result is lush, woozy and sensual, committed to romance even while understanding such things are doomed, and savouring the grandeur of feelings while they last.

Watch the video below, directed by Melanie Drew Chambers, filmed and coloured by Otium, featuring the puppets of The Bob Baker Marionette Theater:

‘First Edition Paperbacks’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: May 2026 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.