“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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Alive People therefore blurs line between live and not. An almost surreal tone, the sense of things heightened, life stripped to its weird, wonderful energies. The mood builds upon that of 2019’s Kleinmeister, also released by Orindal Records, which used an abundance of details to achieve its singular style. “Poetic and often bizarre, Kleinmeister is an album where light and dark are marbled into intricate swirls,” we wrote at the time. A record which straddled the organic, synthetic and spiritual through a sense of accumulation, where the sublime and absurd sat side by side. As we continued:

Juxtaposing Adirondack green and cemetery stone grey with a lurid latex shine, the record presents the environment as a museum of trash—rotting fruit and meat laid out next to polyethylene and polystyrene and plasma-powered TV screens. The physical mess dictates a mental one too, old wounds and shitty thoughts persisting, because no longer are discarded items out of sight and out of mind. Rather, the great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience, the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.

Alive People is no more frugal. After the self-reflective opener ‘No Mono Aware’, which sees Garbus reflect on creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality, the record zips around a diversity of subject matter as it sees fit. ‘Healthy Gamer’ is an ode to the titular character, as well as the strange mix of confinement and freedom which marks their experience. “Stately gamer, living in your chair / Your arm’s length the limit of your stare,” as the opening lines go, though seconds later this is followed by a differing observation. “I see us in those candy lights, above the Sim sea / Arresting our development / But making us free, giving us wings.” The question then becomes, in a society so keen to scrub away purpose or connectivity beyond labour, which is more real—IRL or RPG?

Various collaborators helped shape the album, with elie mcafee-hahn (synth and bass), Julie Bodian (atypical guitars) and Julia Tadlock (voice and presence) all lending their talents on stage, Nick Bisceglia taking engineering duties and Justin Pizzoferrato the mixing. The result is a sound often understated but always surprising, the trademark Ruth Garbus invention extending to their use of space and patience too, allowing the songs to be some of the most visionary and intimate to be released this year. ‘Rubber Tree’ presents an interspecies relationship as a joyous mutualism, ‘Whispers in Steel’ the most delicate ballad to the traffic on Brattleboro streets you’re ever likely to hear, while ‘Waiting for the Sun’ meditates on self-care in all of its banal detail and mindful integrity.

Two small squares of dark chocolate
One or two vials of red wine
“You get the bags”
The candle smells of pine
Waiting for reality to strike
Anxiety is suffering but
Lightly, lightly
We’re waiting on the sun

And things don’t stop there. Songs about the unreality of cinema (‘Pastel Umbrella’) and the transcendence of sports (‘Sports’) are followed by one centring on the miracle of the town hall meeting, the appropriately titled ‘Reenchantment of the World’. “When you go to town meeting you will see people’s minds / Heaping the clay onto mounds under heaven / Reaping the harvests of offices,” as Garbus sings, “And there was government music.” The track brings to mind films like Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall, pushing through the mundane bureaucracy of civil service to reveal the marvel underneath. That energy which exists when people gather as a community, work to realise things they could not achieve alone.

This relationship between the individual and the collective threads right through Alive People—the struggle between protecting personal idiosyncrasies and the enriching potential of the group—right down to the process of its recording. In this way, Alive People could be described as a kind of musical vérité. The product of a single mind, recorded live yet edited to be more truthful than it might otherwise manage. The sound of an individual reaching out beyond their confines in order to share their energy. Songs are awake when you sing them. Between the performer and the performee flows an electricity.

Alive People is out now via Orindal Records you can get it from the Ruth Garbus Bandcamp page.

Cover painting by Audrey Weber

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Ruth Garbus – Strash
Mauno – Vampire
Outer Spaces – Gazing Globe
Benjamin Shaw – Long Ago and Oh So Far Away
Erin Durant – Islands
Daughter of Swords – Dawnbreaker
Melissa Mary Ahern – Maria, Maria
Oscar Lush – Kind Living
Midwife – Angel
Young Elk – False Paradise
Wilder Maker – Love So Well
Big Joanie – Way Out
Secrecies – Life We Live
Beat Radio – Everyone I Know, Just Holding On
American Poetry Club – pro pic?
So Totally – sike
halfsour – Paper Window
Joyer – Here
Marbling – Wisdom Teeth
High Sunn – Grateful
Slow Pulp – New Media
Molly Drag – Out Like a Light
Van Houten – Moon
Birdspotter – Riverbed
Tender Perennial – Delivered
JR Samuels – In Brend 2
Elly Swope – Habits
Derek Piotr – The Sign
Fighting Kites – Kita Senju
Nathalie Joachim – Papa Loko (Interlude: September 24, 1918)
Kali Malone – Sacrificial Code
Kate Tempest – Holy Elixir
Little Musket – Fever Blister
Gold Baby – 500/1
Tennis Club – Stay
Young Mammals – Lost in Lima
Abe Hollow – Paradise
bdrmm – Question Mark
Briston Maroney – Fool’s Gold

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

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Similar ideas run through Kleinmeister, the forthcoming album from Ruth Garbus on Orindal Records. Juxtaposing Adirondack green and cemetery stone grey with a lurid latex shine, the record presents the environment as a museum of trash—rotting fruit and meat laid out next to polyethylene and polystyrene and plasma-powered TV screens. The physical mess dictates a mental one too, old wounds and shitty thoughts persisting, because no longer are discarded items out of sight and out of mind. Rather, the great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience, the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.

“Waste has a solemn aura now,” DeLillo continues. “An aspect of untouchability.” To live in our world is to live amongst the debris of what has gone before.

Ruth Garbus has built a reputation in the New England arts scene as one of the most distinctive and divergent songwriters currently plying their trade. Aside from her work with buzz-pop band Happy Birthday, the psych-folk group Feathers and an experimental quintet alongside Wendy Eisenberg, the Brattleboro, VT-based artist has four solo releases that push against genre tropes in order to craft something weirder and more meaningful. As songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Chris Cohen puts it, “[Garbus’s] songs reaffirm the power of music itself and its basic elements—big and small intervals placed just so in time, the play of sound and meaning in words, parts put together without force or artifice.”

Her fifth solo record, Kleinmeister represents the perfection of Garbus’s esoteric art. Recorded with Travis Laplante and with production and mixing by Ryan Power, Kleinmeister is altogether more vivid than previous releases, and Garbus herself has worked to develop her own sound too—spending two years under the tutelage of opera singer Jim Anderson to fully realise her mezzo soprano vocal range.

Far from dampening Ruth Garbus’s idiosyncratic vision, the studio recording and professional training elevate it to a higher plane, lending a sanctified edge to the singular tone. Poetic and often bizarre, Kleinmeister is an album where light and dark are marbled into intricate swirls, the lasting emotion not anything as simple as happy or sad but rather a kind of extra-personal awe, that of standing before the great overwhelming forces of the world and still having to remember to breathe.

Today, we’re delighted to share the first single and opening track from Kleinmeister, ‘Strash’, a song which shares DeLillo’s reverence for and dread of garbage. Inspired by Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land, Ruth Garbus allows waste its true sensual dimensions, the track loaded with fecund imagery that blurs the line between life and death. The “insurmountable heaps, hot and green” and “visceral viscera wet cardboard steam” is set against an artificial backdrop of plastic toys and technology, the man-made sinking into the tangible world. Here, that which we throw away is not willed out of existence by distance and depth but all around us—Knee high, waist high—and Garbus leads us by the hand as we wade through it, looking for something we might recognise, something we thought we’d be able to forget.

Plasticated paper and popsicle sticks covered in algae
Leppy my stuffed animal being with me till I’m old now
This giant hole
Is the way
That I use
To say
Oooooo
Oooooo she say

The song comes complete with a video directed by Joey Agresta. Check it out below:

Kleinmeister is out on the 30th August via Orindal Records on CD and three vinyl variants (black vinyl, opaque natural vinyl and opaque natural/black transition vinyl) and you can pre-order it now. Also, Ruth Garbus has a handful of live shows in the coming months and you can find the dates below:

Photos by Annie Flanagan, album art by Ruth Garbus

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