ash tuesday is the bedroom pop project of Georgia-based Ashlynn Kilcrease, who has fostered a steady following over the last few years sharing her music on TikTok. Her latest single, ‘No Blood, No Needles, Nothing’ released last week and is the perfect introduction to her emotive songwriting. Whereas previous tracks have been built on electric guitar and percussion, ‘No Blood, No Needles, Nothing’ is stripped back to the bare bones, just acoustic guitar and Kilcrease’s vocals. The raw production values add to the turbulent atmosphere, as the lyrics paint images of broken glass, insecurities and a sense of latent violence. “Thinking you never were really safe,” Kilcrease repeats in the finale, her voice swirled with others that seemingly come from nowhere, like anxious thoughts rising to the surface.

Blue Yonder – Wise Blood

Retreating to an isolated cabin in the wilderness might be a tried and tested way to record a new album, but while the likes of Justin Vernon found romance in the solitude, Blue Yonder had a different experience. While in the woods of upstate New York, they were forced to contend with a variety of trials and hazards, from a potentially haunted tape machine and bad mushroom trips to the escape of their house cat (named, fittingly, Bigfoot). But these experience only furthered the emotional immediacy of singer and guitarist Karalena Fjortoft’s songwriting. The resulting record Wise Blood, out next February via Earth Libraries, is therefore charged with an energy difficult to replicate, the title track hinting at the intimate yet often cinematic style. Check out the Jodorowsky-inspired video below:

Wise Blood is out via Earth Libraries on the 24th February.

Corntuth – F-001

Described as a post-apocalyptic concept record, the forthcoming album Letters To My Robot Son by Brooklyn-based ambient musician Corntuth promises to be a lesson in world building. “Like the analog synthesizers of the mid-80s,” they explain, “robot children are programmed via sequenced sound on magnetic cassette tapes. These tapes, supposedly, can teach a machine to feel.” Lead single ‘F-001’ gives some indication of how such a detailed story can be brought to life in instrumental ambient songs. With slow washes supporting playful details, the track achieves both bright curiosity and meditative grace, with an underlying melancholy too.

Daisy the Great – Time Machine

Fronted by  Kelley Nicole Dugan and Mina Walker, Brooklyn pop ensemble Daisy the Great combine the sincerity of Bridgers/Dacus indie rock lineage with lush folk harmonies, and a sprinkling of bedroom pop vulnerability thrown in for good measure, though latest single ‘Time Machine’ shows off another dimension to their new album, All You Need Is Time. It’s the frantic and cutting tone which marks the Anthropocene, where the sense of impending doom is matched only by a desire to go back to better times, though one complicated by the nagging doubt we’d do things exactly the same over again, no matter how costly. Check out the video directed by Scott Felix below.

The sea is crying
The moon is sighing
It’s terrifying
It’s terrifying

It’s all around us
The end has crowned us
The star has found us

All You Need Is Time is out now and available from the usual places.

Dan Croll – How Close We Came

Following on from the success of LP Grand Plan and EP On Top in recent years, Dan Croll has returned with brand new single, ‘How Close We Came’. A stripped back and compassionate song about the immediate aftermath of a long-term relationship, Croll’s packing his belongings into boxes, kissing the cat goodbye. But far from the traditional picture of regret and longing, the song captures the break-up from an angle seldom offered. One of bright fondness, an appreciation any of it happened at all. “After the initial heartbreak, it was something I felt quite proud of,” Croll explains. “We’d been through so much together and really grew into much better people, and [the song] was about that period of looking back with pride on such a profound experience.”

‘How Close We Came’ is out now Communion Records.

Doom Flower – Telehealth

After the release of the self-titled album late in 2021, Doom Flower are set to open 2023 with a brand new record, Limestone Ritual. Again released via ‘record label’, the album sees Jess Price (Campdogzz), Bobby Burg (Joan of Arc, Make Believe, Love of Everything) and Matt Lemke (Wedding Dress) combine their sizeable experience into something new not out of necessity but the simple pleasure of creating. Latest single ‘Telehealth’ gives a view into the spirit of the record. A hazy, laid back shuffle which simmers beneath Price’s vocals, the words emerging with an almost disinterested gloom, though within the murmured rhythm stirs something hypnotic.

Ian Davies – Stubborn

Back in 2021 we wrote about The King of Bedroom Country by Ian Davies, an album which offered a sound “at once laid back and fatalistic”, capturing something of the classic country spirit in a more contemporary setting to convey how “no matter how painful or dispiriting, there’s some connection to be found within melancholy.” With new releases on the horizon, Davies has returned with a single ‘Stubborn’. It’s a track which delves into the overthinking mind and the illusions it is capable of conjuring, the easygoing seventies style juxtaposed against the torment of the narrator’s position, where various compulsions have obscured the truth of loss.

Kraków Loves Adana – When The Storm Comes (ft. Ruth Radelet & Adam Miller)

We’ve covered the work of Deniz Çiçek’s Kraków Loves Adana several times in the past, each time struck by their ability to weave atmospheric dream pop soundscapes at once human and digital. “A space,” as we described in a review of 2021’s Follow the Voice, “in which the boundaries between physical reality, virtual reality and dreams began to merge and blur.” Ahead of new record Oceanflower out early next year, Kraków Loves Adana has teamed up with Ruth Radelet and Adam Miller of dream pop icons The Chromatics for new single, ‘When the Storm Comes’. A song about finding some strange beauty in present turmoil while also looking forward to some better future. Check out Wesley Doloris’s video below.

Wake me up
When the storm comes
I wanna be impressed
At least for a second or two
Before everything ends

Oceanflower is out on the14th February and you can pre-order it now from the Kraków Loves Adana Bandcamp page.

Steven van Betten – I Didn’t Mean To Do That

Los Angeles-based Steven van Betten is gearing up to release his first solo record Friends and Family sometime in 2023 via Future Gods, and new single ‘I didn’t Mean To Do That’ serves as an introduction as to what to expect. It’s a gentle, warm song which explores mistakes in all of their guises. “Some mistakes (though painful at the time) can age quite well,” van Betten explains. “They become funny, entertaining, and even cherished memories; parables of personal growth shared openly with friends around the dinner table.” But of course there’s kind of mistake too. “The kind that hurt those we love most—can haunt us.” ‘I Didn’t Mean To Do That’ takes stock of both, recognising mistakes as a fundamentally human experience, and using this fact as a path toward forgiveness and compassion.

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Those familiar with Price’s work in Campdogzz will find lines between In Rounds and Doom Flower, though the two records are outwardly very different. The Campdogzz record sounded “scorched and dangerous,” we wrote in a preview, its sense of scale and weight lending the foreboding air of an approaching storm. While no less evocative, Doom Flower’s style is altogether more insular. Something more reserved, conjuring spaces small and introspective. As though the portent came good and a storm ravaged the land, leaving Price to pick through the wreckage and attempt to construct something resembling a life from the pieces.

Tracks like ‘Get a Job’ and ‘Anything’ wind their way through such a space, bereft of everything but unanswered questions. The environment might lack the Biblical weight of those conjured by Campdogzz, but they are no less hostile. The uneasy aftermath of something. A world of inherent sadness and suffering, the small cruelty of day to day living.

Which is not to paint listening to Doom Flower as an emotionally numb experience. There’s a certain anxiety throughout, be it the simmering, volatile kind present on ‘Headlights’ to the lightheaded, otherworldly sway of ‘House Warp’. This needling dread marbles with the overarching melancholy of the album, and this juxtaposition of stillness and movement gets under the skin. Take ‘Thrill Wheel’, an ostensibly slow, hushed track which hides a building disquiet. An opaque vessel filled slowly, holding for now but always threatening to spill over.

Doom Flower is out via Record Label and you can get it now from Bandcamp, including a vinyl edition.

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