Ada Lea – when i paint my masterpiece

Saddle Creek

How does someone approach creating their magnum opus? The title of Ada Lea‘s third album when i paint my masterpiece might set the bar very high for the Montreal artist, not least off the back off two stellar records released in 2019 and 2021 respectively, though spend time within the album and it becomes clear it is not so much concerned with the final product as the process of creation itself. Because contrary to its name, when i paint is no lesson in artistic obsession. Rather it is an ode to the value of stepping back and allowing life the space to unfold. Because while Alexandra Levy did indeed take a big swing, writing over two hundreds songs before slowly distilling the list into the final sequence, her artistic practise was intentionally spacious, curious and open-ended. Levy lists “resting, extending my creative reach, going back to school, studying painting and poetry,” as key components to this mode of working. “Taking a step away from music as guided by industry expectations. Simplifying things. Getting a job, starting to teach. Engaging with the process rather than the product.” The trick to painting a masterpiece, it seems, is learning to put the brush down every once in a while. Being kind to yourself and opening your heart and eyes to the surrounding world.

Adeline Hotel – Watch The Sunflowers

Ruination Record Co.

Across a string of recent albums, Dan Knishkowy’s Adeline Hotel has welcomed listeners into the most complicated, intimate recesses of life, examining themes of love, loneliness, codependency and loss from every angle you might imagine. He’s zoomed in so close the familiar is rendered strange, pulled back so far we get a bird’s eye view from above, each record seeing the sound shapeshift into something different in order to capture a new perspective or subtle change in the circumstances. There’s been solo guitar, piano ballads, languid jazz and raucous rock, but after the austerity and uncertainty of 2024’s Whodunnit, latest full-length Watch The Sunflowers pivots towards the opposite pole of the spectrum with a kaleidoscopic style. “The album is a reaction to the threadbare arrangements of its predecessor,” as we wrote earlier in the year. “As though, having endured the aftermath of loss, the colour has come back into Knishkowy’s world.” This change might not represent a total epiphany, Knishkowy’s lyrics are as questioning as ever, but rather a newfound clarity in which entrenched beliefs dissipate and such searching begins to feel meaningful.

Anna Tivel – Animal Poem

Fluff and Gravy Records

“’It’s hard to know how to hold a creative life in a time that feels fraught with venomous division, careening technological advance, and an ever-widening chasm between the affluent and the dispossessed,’ says Anna Tivel, the songwriter who has won acclaim with albums like Blue World, Outsiders (plus its stripped back Live in a Living Room twin) and Living Thing. Such concerns have long troubled Tivel’s work, the latter record being was what we called ‘a decidedly existential response to a period of entrapment and encroaching death.’ It used the pandemic as a platform to explore human suffering more generally, though dwell on such ideas too long and the entire artistic endeavour can come to seem futile. ‘What good are poems when affordable housing is scarce,’ as she continues, ‘the climate teeters on a dangerous edge, and war breaks out over misinformation spread by profit hungry algorithms?’ Tivel’s latest full-length Animal Poem is not so much an answer to this question as one artist’s small contribution towards one. A small piece of the colossal, communal whole demanded of us. The imperative to celebrate life and warn of its fragility. To remind everyone of just what we stand to lose should the malevolent forces of this world be allowed to grow.” [Review]

The Antlers – Blight

Transgressive

“’Lately I’ve become more aware of the cost of convenience, how the choices I make as a consumer seem insignificant, but can add up to something disastrous.’ So explains Peter Silberman of The Antlers when speaking about the origins of the project’s seventh album Blight. The record, written over several years and mostly recorded at Silberman’s home studio in upstate New York, utilises The Antlers’ distinctive mix of raw emotion and almost otherworldly arrangements to cast the present moment in a new light. One able to take something familiar and apparently ordinary and reveal it as anything but, be that the calamitous consequences of our consumerist culture or else the oft-ignored beauty of the natural world which stands to be lost as a result. As Silberman concludes: ‘These songs were born out of an attempt to come to grips with my guilt’.” [Review]

Benjamin Shaw – Strange Feelings in Nervous Business / Publicly Funded Research into Lofty Enchantment / Immortal Jellyfish

Hand Drawn Hand

Unofficially dubbed the “Fumblinginthedark trilogy,” the three albums Benjamin Shaw released in the second half of the year were as much an exercise in musical therapy as they were creations for an audience. Shaw’s life took a turn for the difficult, and he took refuge in a creative world of his own making, using (mostly) just guitar, synth and some pedals to establish its borders and depths. “In an attempt to try and escape my flailing brain I wanted to find a way of playing and improvising in a live way,” Shaw explains. “After a bit of experimentation and a few trips to Facebook marketplace, I eventually stumbled on a nice way of live-looping and building things in real time.” Luckily for us, Shaw does not close the door behind himself. The trilogy, best experienced as a whole, offers a life line to anyone in need of time out of the harsh realities of the day to day.

Carson McHone – Pentimento

Merge Records

Pentimento is a term from art history that refers to the traces of an earlier painting that show through layers of paint on a canvas. A thought or sketch or discarded draft, even a different painting entirely, that nevertheless informs the final work, if only in its absence. The concept is central to Carson McHone’s latest album, which itself is built from (and literally on top of) a vast catalogue of inspirations, from literature and field recordings to diary entries, watercolour paintings and lines of poetry scribbled on postcards. The result is a folk rock record rich in detail but with a loose artistic flair. Barrelling rockers sit next to beautifully simple pastoral folk, interspersed with snippets of poetry and snatches of other recordings, lost conversations, forgotten songs, fragments that drift in and are suddenly gone. Set against what McHone describes as a “backdrop of global crisis,” this mosaic manages to ponder questions otherwise too big to broach, its apparently dissonant style giving some voice to the unsayable and ultimately exploring how love and beauty can persist in a world in such a dire state.

Craig Finn – Always Been

Thirty Tigers

The theme of redemption has long run through the work of Craig Finn, most notably the resurrection arc of Holly on The Holy Steady‘s seminal Separation Sunday, but also across his solo catalogue, as with the evocation of the story of Ulysses S. Grant on 2019’s I Need a New War. Finn’s characters are often on the margins, existing in the aftermath of lives lived too fast or too hard, searching for salvation in any way it might avail itself, even if it’s just leaving enough of a story behind that people will remember your name. The protagonist of Finn’s sixth solo full-length Always Been is no different, a man with no faith who nevertheless joined the clergy, seeking the security and gravitas afforded to the role (“Cause when I was a child, I used to fixate on the chaplain,” he sings on opener ‘Bethany’, “The way he brought the widows all to tears / And that looked like a decent way to make a little living here / Gave myself to God for a few years”). Only our would-be priest quickly falls from grace and into the arms of any number of vices, and Always Been charts the slow arc towards his own redemption. With this clear focus and a polished LA aesthetic, the record could be one of Finn’s most narrative to date, though various tracks drift from the central character to illuminate other corners of his world. And it’s a testament to Finn’s writing that these songs are some of the highlights. Recalling the likes of Zevon or Browne, ‘Crumbs’ is golden and gathers momentum, while the quasi-bonus track ‘Shamrock’ is a stripped-back slice of traditional folk, though both capture pictures of people driven to desperation by the ratcheting pressure of life, yet always reaching into the future, ever hopeful of that one break which might erase the past and elevate them above the present. The moment they’ve always been waiting for in which they might be saved.

Dao Strom – Tender Revolutions

Antiquated Future Records / Beacon Sound

“Born in Vietnam and now based in Portland, Oregon, Dao Strom is an artist interested in overlap, convergence and symbiosis. Someone, as per their bio, ‘who works with three ‘voices’—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories.’ The result is the perfect marriage of style and substance. Music, poetry, writing and various amalgams of all three cross-pollinated by collaboration and linked across time and geography, giving voice to those who might otherwise be silenced and breaking down established boundaries. Drawing on the sensibilities of ambient, folk, post-rock, spoken word and sound collage, Strom’s latest full-length Tender Revolutions is the embodiment of this style. A joint release between Antiquated Future Records and Beacon Sound, the album comes complete with an accompanying book, released via The 3rd Thing press, to support and expand upon its themes. ‘These songs are, for me, inward and outward (ex)tendings across boundaries of self, diaspora, modalities of voice, across fractures and refractions,’ as Strom explains. ‘They are attempts at honoring small points and lines of connectivity I’ve been entangling in, for over a decade now, namely through creative collaborations and friendships with other Vietnamese women writers and artists’.” [Review]

Daughter of Swords – Alex

Psychic Hotline

“In some ways Alex is the perfect spring record. There are quiet moments of green shoots and bursting buds, and others of sudden, somewhat shocking, metamorphosis. The brash pop moments must be how a butterfly feels after emerging from its chrysalis, suddenly brighter, bolder, realising it has these beautiful wings and deciding to flap them. Messy in the best way possible. [Daughter of Swords‘] Alex Sauser-Monnig takes on the overwhelming, confusingly contradictive nature of contemporary life by mimicking it in music. If their career thus far has been defined by the restraint and minimalism of voice and (sometimes) guitar, Alex is something of its inverse, throwing everything into the pot and stirring gleefully. There’s danceable electronic pop and rumbling indie rock, easy melodies and tangles of synthetic textures… Left-field pop structures and inventive electronics create something equal parts catchy and deep. Plus, its moments of political awareness mean the introspective moments of self-reflection feel less like selfish solipsism and more a blueprint for liberation. A less-than-gentle nudge to defy convention and have the courage to live life as oneself in a world that feels increasingly allergic to outliers and eccentrics.” [Review]

Dean Johnson – I Hope We Can Still Be Friends

Saddle Creek

“Well, I’m feelin’ so much better now,” sings Dean Johnson in a moment that encapsulates his sophomore record I Hope We Can Still Be Friends. It’s the beginning of a song, his emotionally piercing throwback vocal style ringing out unadorned like a breath of fresh air, and it’s easy to imagine the bustling barroom fall to silence as people turn to listen. But, typically for the Seattle-based songwriter, the initial relief is something of an emotional sleight of hand. “Since I had my mind erased,” he continues as the true scenario reveals itself, “If I passed you on the street, I would not recognize your face.” What at first seemed like an instance of self-actualisation was actually just heartbreak wrapped up in a pretty melody and a joke about electroconvulsive therapy. It’s illustrative of a record that effortlessly marries sardonic humour and sincere vulnerability, icy bitterness and easygoing charm. Johnson croons like a long-lost Everly brother as he delivers tragicomic missives on our weird world and the sad and absurd characters that populate it, at times approaching broad social commentary and others bitingly personal. It’s Johnson with his complexities and foibles on full display, prickly and sensitive, hopelessly romantic and unapologetically cynical, often within a single song.

Devin Shaffer – Patience

American Dreams

“As Patience is the first album on which Devin Shaffer is joined by a group of supporting musicians, you’d be forgiven for anticipating something even richer and more intricate than her previous work. But the reality is something different. Because rather than showing off an increasingly ornate, layered sound, the album pivots towards the opposite. A sound stripped back and intimate, swapping out its textures in favour of increased precision, the instrumentalists coming together in a collective effort towards clarity. This turn towards lucidity speaks to the themes of Patience too. If previous album In My Dreams I’m There represented an arc of sorts, Shaffer moving from confusion and hesitancy towards a sense of acceptance, then the new record instead interrogates just what it requires to achieve lasting peace. That is, to reject the idea of a neat arc entirely, resist the temptation to believe one achievement or epiphany will solve your life for good. The songs of her debut sound like Shaffer battling against the noise of the world in search of an answer, but in dropping this ambient backdrop, Patience ceases the fight. Submits to the messiness of our interiors and indeed the wider world.” [Review]

Dylan Henner – Star Dream FM

Phantom Limb

“‘Late one evening, I was listening to the radio alone at home. I couldn’t find the station I wanted, so I shifted the dial around for a while. Between frequencies, fading in and out of fidelity, I found a station I’d never heard before. To my amazement, the station was broadcasting my own memories. Memories from when I was seventeen.’ So explains Dylan Henner of Star Dream FM, the enigmatic producer using this idea as the basis for a collection of songs which explores both the tactile experience of adolescence and the nostalgia of times now past. ‘The result feels personal,’ we wrote in our review, though there’s the undercurrent of something different. The sense Henner is not so much tapping into his own memories but a kind of collective yearning. One developed not through individual experience but the culture itself. The cinematic version of youth delivered to us so steadily we come to mourn it as our own.” [Review]

Ear – The Most Dear and The Future

Self-released

The project of Yaelle Avtan and Jonah Paz, ear make glitchy collages of indie pop and electronic music that draw on the duo’s background in “experimental electronic hardcore” and twee folk. Following some near-viral success on streaming services, debut album The Most Dear and the Future presents their unique and oddly compelling style to the world proper. Each of the eight songs are short and sweet, slipping effortlessly from gentle, near-whispered pop to headphone-shaking electronica in the blink of an eye. It all feels very now. Like indie pop for the age of short form video, kind of wild and hyperactive but also sad and lonely in a way that’s best described as nostalgia for something that has never existed. Imagine a dark room lit only by the harsh blue light of a screen, the world and everything in it whizzing by fried eyeballs in a blur of angst and emotion. It would fit on the soundtrack to the next Jane Schoenbrun film for sure.

Eliza Niemi – Progress Bakery

Vain Mina / Tin Angel Records

“To describe the music of Eliza Niemi as pop music feels like both an over- and understatement. On the one hand, these are deeply quirky and unique songs, built with an artist’s intuitive sense of composition and with little regard for conventional structures. But they are also undeniably infectious, packed with of melody and a sense of playfulness that feels baked into the record’s very bones. Which makes its sense of childlike curiosity (admittedly with more than a little added grown-up cynicism) feel genuine rather than cloying or twee. Niemi isn’t painting a pastel-hued cartoon of real life, but focussing on its gritty, peculiar details. And at the heart of it all are those questions, some funny and knowing, but others piercingly direct and vulnerable, evoking a very relatable sense of bewilderment at trying to find one’s place in this weird world. “Will it be what I wanted?” as she asks on ‘Pocky’. “Will it be how I pictured it?’ It’s a style full of wonder, though not often in the starry-eyed-awe-at-the-majesty-of-the-universe sense. Rather something more literal and commonplace, with Niemi often picking up thoughts and ideas and putting them down again, only to return eight songs later to wonder anew. ” [Review]

Ella Hanshaw – Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book

SPINSTER

Ella Hanshaw always dreamed of being a country star. Born in Procious, West Virginia in 1934, Hanshaw took up the guitar when she was twelve and hardly put it down for the rest of her days, writing hundreds of songs and touring across the state with her quartet, though never recording professionally or releasing anything in an official manner. Released five years after her death, Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book corrects the latter fact, Hanshaw’s granddaughter curating a collection of tracks recorded at home and church, not only celebrating and preserving the legacy of one of Appalachia’s most prolific songwriters, but allowing her devout message to continue to find new ears. “By the late 1970s, her music had become inseparable from her faith,” as the album notes describe. “She considered her work to be authored by God, who would ‘give’ her a song—both lyrics and melody—which she could write down and complete in fifteen minutes”. But ultimately, Ella Hanshaw’s Black Book is more than a document of one singular artist’s faith and vision. It is proof of the rich, lasting history of artists working in the margins, outside of the mainstream, and the ways in which music might allow a person to transcend the hand they are dealt in life. “By writing gospel music, performing in church, and viewing her artistic talent and inspiration as gifts from God, Ella framed her work in such a way that she could still claim artistic agency while avoiding individual attention that may have been perceived as self-indulgent and socially unacceptable,” as the album notes continue. “Resistant to the potential consequences of a professional music career as a woman and mother, Ella chose to keep her music a non-professional pursuit, shared with family, community, and God, which allowed her to uphold the duty she felt to all three.”

Erika Dohi – Myth of Tomorrow

Switch Hit Records / Figureight Records

“Described as ‘a sonic meditation on catastrophe, resilience, and rebirth,’ [Erika Dohi‘s Myth of Tomorrow] builds upon the eclectic style of predecessor I, Castorpollux to push Dohi’s sound in new directions, utilising a variety of sensibilities from dance, jazz, ambient and classical modes to create soundscapes as singular as they are striking. The record draws its title from the Taro Okamoto’s mural of the same name, and the title track draws the clearest line between the two artworks. A song concerned with the endless cycles of existence, not only asking what they demand of us but also how we might find peace and healing within the recurring patterns of life.” [Review]

Florry – Sounds Like…

Dear Life Records

“Positivity permeates [The Holey Bible],” we wrote of Florry‘s seminal album back in 2023, the release seeing Francie Medosch and co. embrace a country aesthetic but swerve the lonesome blues so common in the genre in favour of something more uplifting. “Through woozy waltzes, fuzzy Country-fried rockers and no small amount of narrative attention, Florry rise from an uncertain, bleak world like a Roman candle, as though the only way to live nowadays is to meet despair with an equal and opposite force.” With this style established, follow-up Sounds Like… fires on all cylinders from the off. The release of a band who have nailed down their identity and are now able to explore is vast, idiosyncratic terrain, jamming the pedal to the floor in order to cover as much ground as possible with good old fashioned rock and roll abandon. When Medosch cites The Jackass theme song as a big influence on the record, you sense the inspiration was less stylistic than spiritual. A calling to gather a group a pals together and whip up a storm, even if it means a little chaos and risk along the way.

Friendship – Caveman Wakes Up

Merge Records

“Reconnected trailer hitch / Rerouted drainage ditch / Resenting your fellow man / Shotgunning a Busch Light can.” So plays the average day for the protagonist of ‘All Over The World’ from Friendship‘s Caveman Wakes Up, a hard-working man going nowhere fast, his days locked into an apparently endless cycle of effort, small comforts and jaded acceptance. Yet true to spirit of the album, this apparent mundanity is layered with a plethora of different experiences, revealing the everyday to be more absurd than ordinary. Take how the simmering class consciousness which spikes the nine-to-five (“Got a job pulling weeds / On other people’s property / Shoring up liquidity / On other people’s property”) coexists with a near total capitulation to the boss’s desires (“Boss wants to know where you’re at […] Boss calls and you cave just like that”). Or how laying a lawn, surely the most banal, consumerist and unnatural thing on this manicured-green earth, leads to a chance encounter with the divine (“Dandelion seed caught your eye / Felt the beating heart of God / Laying down a roll of sod”). The song is just one example of a style running through Caveman Wakes Up, and arguably Friendship as a project more widely. A small world in which life is boring and surprising, shocking, magic and lonely all at once.

Frog – 1,000 Variations of the Same Song / The Count

Audio Antihero

“An album which runs the gamut between indie rock, alt country and smoky lounge cool, and packs the expected density and diversity of references from a Frog release, with Daniel Bateman nodding to My Chemical Romance, Gucci, Stillwell construction supplies, fatherhood, the 6 train and seemingly a million other things. But for all of these maximalist sensibilities, the record also lives up to its title by repeatedly orbiting the same ideas […] The effect is something like that of a phylogenetic tree, where the same amphibian DNA passes through generation after generation, morphing through all manner of phenotypes yet retaining that Frog spirit through them all. Just where this organism will evolve next is anyone’s guess, but we have a thousand possibilities to get through yet.” [Review]

Fust – Big Ugly

Dear Life Records

“[Fust‘s] Big Ugly functions as a detailed picture of such a [contemporary Southern] milieu, offering small glimpses into the lives of various characters which move across the frame. The artwork is a mural taken from the Big Ugly Community Centre [in West Virginia] that once served as a backdrop to a school play. Here it serves an identical purpose, albeit in a more abstract light. We meet people wandering as though dazed in the post-industrial present, pining for hard labour and good wages, struggling to find hours selling junk at the gas station. Or struggling with small home improvements as their houses slowly fall down around them. But also, most importantly, we see life continuing its rhythms, memories repeating, hopes emerging still. A picture of Appalachian or Southern life which does not yearn for escape or preach self-improvement, but loves and dreams instead. ‘They’ll have to haul me off,’ as the title track opens. ‘Off a down slope / in some front end loader / in a pine box / if they want me gone / if they want me lost / If they don’t want my lonesome here / they’ll have to haul me off.’ You are from where you are from, after all. A squalid home is home nonetheless, and the funny thing about fondness and pride is how they survive the most naked of truths. Fust aren’t interested in willful ignorance, rose-tinted reminiscence or giddy myth-making. The record wears its name for a reason. They want the big ugly whole.” [Review]

Greg Jamie – Across a Violet Pasture

Orindal Records

“‘I’d get away from that body / there’s nothing left we can do / and if I ever come back from the country / I’m going swimming with you.’ So sings Portland, Maine songwriter and painter Greg Jamie in the opening lines of ‘I’d Get Away’, the first track from his new album Across a Violet Pasture. The cryptic, almost contradictory verse is a fitting introduction for a full-length which exists at the intersection of things. The real and unreal, the physical and spiritual, the personal, the historical and the mythic. One which does not so much blur the boundary between such categories as embrace their duality, the real world punctuated with high strangeness and vice versa, the known and unknown superimposed. The result is undeniably weird yet intrinsically human, demonstrated by an opening verse where the image of floating away from the body is paired with the pleasure of floating within it. As though to exist is to both long for transcendence from corporeal reality and desire an unending experience of bodily sensation. We want to feel forever, yet wish for something more.” [Review]

Hannah Frances – Nested in Tangles

Fire Talk

“Released in 2024, Hannah Frances‘s album Keeper of the Shepherd represented an act of exhumation, digging through the remnants of the past to unearth those things which had long been lost. The process led to no small amount of dirt under the fingernails and demanded a fundamental vulnerability, something Frances happily endured in order to undertake this vital process […] Frances’s new album Nested in Tangles plays like the thicket of flora which sprouts from the ground broken by its predecessor. The life brought forth from turned-over earth. A diversity present not only in theme or tone but style itself […] A healthy and fulfilling life is never just one thing, a monoculture neat and constant and happy, but rather an ecosystem of moods, periods and personas. A place where our different selves coexist and even care for one another, and there’s space for every shade of shadow and light.” [Review]

herbal tea – Hear as the Mirror Echoes

Orindal Records

“The recording project of Bristol‘s Helena Walker, herbal tea takes the DIY intimacy of bedroom pop and expands outwards, building what might otherwise be humble demos into rich, nuanced soundscapes, as though the original basis of each track is merely a door through which entire new worlds lie in wait. The result is a sound rooted in the personal yet innately transcendent. An ethereal space not unlike a dream, stitched together from memories, desires and nostalgic longing yet impermanent by its very nature. A place, that is, removed from the physical demands on existence and thus the ideal vantage for self-reflection. One imbued with the weightlessness of flying or floating which offers the opportunity to examine the familiar without the everyday burden of the body.” [Review]

HLLLYH – URUBURU

Team Shi

“Anyone clued into the indie scene of the noughties will likely have encountered The Mae Shi, the outfit which delivered a blend of art rock, punk, pop and electronic sensibilities bundled up in a manic, madcap intensity, culminating with acclaimed Biblical full-length HLLLYH in 2008. The project has been through various stages of hiatus in intervening years, but now founding member Tim Byron has rounded up the original cast for a new album, URUBURU. Only when Jeff Byron, Ezra Buchla, Brad Breeck and Corey Fogel got together, the result felt less like the last chapter of the Mae Shi and more like a fresh beginning. Hence a new name—HLLLYH. Described as ‘an end-of-the-world story written on a mobius strip,’ URUBURU shows HLLLYH have hit the ground running, displaying no let up from the infectiously inventive sound that won the Mae Shi so many admirers. ‘Built from bright colors and loud sounds, it is a puzzle to be solved written in English, Morse code, and machine language,’ as the band write of the record. ‘It tells several interconnected stories of punk house party disasters, young monsters in love, space travel gone wrong, adventures in other dimensions, showdowns with malevolent forces, and the never ending quest for meaning.'” [Review]

Hour – Subminiature

Dear Life Records

Collected from recordings captured on a variety of devices across more than two years of touring, Hour‘s Subminiature is less an ordinary live album than a celebration of the entire project. Led by the apparently inexhaustible Michael Cormier-O’Leary, the Philadelphia-based ensemble has established itself as a dynamic, ever-shifting entity over recent years, albums like Anemone Red, Tiny Houses and Ease the Work practising an inventive, curious style of chamber folk never content to stay in one place. Thus the form of Subminiature could not be more fitting, the release positioning tracks from all previous albums alongside new material and seeing the band shift from number to number along with the settings and venues. All in all, Jacob Augustine, Jason Calhoun, Em Downing, Matt Fox, Peter Gill, Lucas Knapp, Evan McGonagill, Peter McLaughlin, Keith J. Nelson, Erika Nininger, Abi Reimold and Adelyn Strei all appear, with Cormier-O’Leary the only constant. But spend any time at all within this music and it becomes clear that, far from losing something with the perpetual change, such fluidity is itself the very essence of Hour.

Jahnah Camille – My sunny oath!

Winspear

Jahnah Camille “has a knack for combining emotion and self-awareness,” we wrote of 2024’s i tried to freeze light, but only remember a girl, as the EP reached across genres to create a nuanced tone “entirely committed to the feelings being explored but never lacking a wry wrinkle to add that extra layer of personality.” With help from producer Alex Farrar (Wednesday, Indigo De Souza, MJ Lenderman), Camille’s latest release My sunny oath! takes this style to new heights, tapping into a freshly thunderous sound to capture the tumultuous experience of young adulthood. Shoegaze, alt-rock and grunge influences assert themselves more prominently, and while the same sweet and sour approach of its predecessor allows for both heart and sardonic humour, there’s a notable new edge to the tracks. A kind of self-defensive toughness that gives the sense of a young woman passing into a hostile world and coming to realise what it takes to survive.

JJJJJerome Ellis – Vesper Sparrow

Shelter Press

“Through a combination of saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics and vocals, Grenadian–Jamaican–American artist JJJJJerome Ellis creates atmospheric, often improvisatory soundscapes able to disrupt the normal flow of things. Having had a stutter since childhood (the stylising of ‘JJJJJerome’ is a reference to the fact they most frequently stutter their own name), Ellis sometimes found it difficult to express themselves verbally while growing up, though soon found an outlet after discovering the saxophone in seventh grade. The creative practice which developed from that point of origin does not exist in spite of the stutter but in fellowship with it, Ellis developing into a multi-instrumentalist interested in how both stuttering and music can suspend or expand time, working to utilise this fact to further the artistic and thematic potential of their work […] Vesper Sparrow uses this as a framework around which to build something even more ambitious. A space carved out of the hectic every day into which the listener is invited, Ellis using the album as a kind of intermission within ordinary time where we might consider histories both personal and communal, as well as those of the natural world, and thus come to honour and understand ourselves more faithfully. Blackness is central to the record, as is lineage and spirituality, and the result is something which upends the linearity of experience to invite us back into the present.” [Review]

Jouska – How Did I Wind Up Here?

Koke Plate

“While the previous Jouska record Suddenly My Mind Is Blank was crafted from a notably polished electro pop, How Did I Wind Up Here? record sees [Marit Othilie] Thorvik favour something more textured, wrapping raw emotion with a gauzy style. The result, as [single] ‘Pierced’ shows, owes a debt to both dream pop and trip hop. A sound full of contradiction, somehow managing to conjure a sparse night time atmosphere without sacrificing any weight, and managing to pair emotional immediacy with an ambiguously dreamy drift.” [Review]

Kitba – Hold The Edges

Ruination Record Co.

“Proof that art can offer a picture of identity more nuanced than simple labels,” we wrote of Kitba‘s self-titled album back in 2023. “A deeper understanding reached via an embrace of confusion. Identity as an ongoing thing.” New full-length Hold the Edges continues and deepens this exploration of identity, the Brooklyn-based harpist and songwriter calling on a number of friends and collaborators to offer a typically lush, detailed and intuitive sound which works through a particularly tumultuous period while refusing to be dragged down. The path to self-discovery is not a finite number of epiphanic steps but rather something convoluted and unending, Kitba seems to understand. Full knowledge is always just out of reach. But while this might be frustrating in the present, it can be freeing across time, allowing skins to be shed, renewal to manifest, life to be leavened by an ongoing sense of possibility. “Am I enough to carry me through?” asks closing track ‘Cards’, showing that doubt will always be close by, but step back and consider the record, and it becomes clear Hold The Edges has provided the answer already.

Kristin Daelyn – Beyond the Break

Orindal Records

“’I used to hurry everywhere, / and leaped over the running creeks. / There wasn’t / time enough for all the wonderful things / I could think of to do / in a single day. Patience / comes to the bones / before it take root in the heart / as another good idea.’ So wrote Mary Oliver in her poem ‘Patience’, the principle inspiration for the lead single of Kristin Daelyn‘s Beyond the Break. ‘Patience Comes to the Bones’ introduces a collection of songs which looks to carve a space of reflection and peace within the tumultuous present, approaching the dissatisfaction and suffering common to us all from a decidedly compassionate angle. Supported by guest appearances from Dan Knishkowy (Adeline Hotel), Danny Black (Good Old War, Gregory Alan Isakov) and Patrick Riley, Daelyn’s soulful vocals and intricate, intimate guitar welcome the audience into the space so that we too might re-examine our lives from new angles and come to appreciate the fellowship to be found in the universality of longing.” [Review]

Lael Neale – Altogether Stranger

Sub Pop

Written after bouncing between rural isolation and urban rush for several years, Lael Neale‘s Altogether Stranger lives up to its title in more ways than one. “On returning to Los Angeles I felt like an extraterrestrial landing on a dystopian planet,” she explains, “so I’m writing from the perspective of a being from another realm witnessing the peculiarities of humanity.” Thus the ‘stranger’ of the title functions as both a noun and a verb, Neale approaching LA from an oblique angle, an alien who sees the city’s banality as bizarre and its absurdities even weirder. Clocking in at a succinct thirty-two minutes, the record seems to promise more of the tight, electrical minimalism established across previous LPs Acquainted With Night and Star Eater’s Delight, though in reality holds some of Neale’s most adventurous work to date. Because scratch the sleek surface and you’ll find a dizzying concoction of moods and influences, the album a mirror of the odd, alluring city which serves as its setting, enemy and muse.

Last Quokka – Take The Fight To The Bastards

Self-released

Not every band would kick off their new record with the story of an anticapitalist mihirung (a now extinct Australian bird also known as the ‘demon duck’ or ‘thunder bird’) tearing through the oligarch class of Aussie society. But Last Quokka are not every band. Woolworths, Woodside and favourite enemy Gina Rinehart all get their comeuppance at the hand of this vengeful living fossil within the first three minutes of Take The Fight To The Bastards, setting the tone for a record as fun and furious as anything the Perth punks have put out to date. Across the subsequent ten tracks we get diatribes against the insidious rise of identikit watering holes (‘Save Our Pubs’), condemnations of the greedy and their exploitation (‘Cost of Living’, ‘Out for the Weekend’) and even an ode to the queen of SW6 Sam Kerr (‘Stupid White Bastard’). The newly expanded line-up push the sound further than ever and give Trent Rojahn’s acerbic vocals the backdrop they deserve. We might live in disheartening times but, with the fire of Last Quokka behind us, retaliation starts to feel possible once again. As Rojahn sings on call to arms ‘Murujuga (DBH)’:

Disrupt Burrup Hub
And industry expansion
Take the fight to the bastards
And paint the town yellow
Take the fight to Woodside
Take the fight to Rio Tinto
Take the fight to BHP
Take the fight to the police
Take the fight to the bastards

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Live Like The Sky

You’ve Changed Records

“Our minds are spread out all over this place / full of persistence and surrounded by grace, / their starving lies are crumbling all around / but we belong to this sacred ground.” This verse, taken from the opening track of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson‘s latest album Live Like The Sky, not only encapsulates the spirit of the record, but illuminates the heart which drives the Michi Saagiig Nishinaabeg writer, scholar and artist’s work more generally. Like her novel Noopiming and more recent genre-bending book Theory Of Water, Live Like the Sky is both an expression of struggle and celebration of history. It confronts the violence and genocide of the White Western project and reclaims the lands it tried to make its own, all while documenting the catastrophes the colonial powers have brought upon themselves and offering modes of survival and resistance. The result is a castigation (‘Disintegrations’), an elegy (‘Nizhooziibing’), a practical manual (’85 Dollars an Acre’), a prayer (‘Minode’e’). A reminder of the interconnection of all things, and the dire consequences to be faced by those greedy or foolish enough to believe they can rule on their own. “Courage sits and smiles, breaks open the overpass,” Betasamosake Simpson sings on ‘Murder of Crows’. “She sings a hymn for the cars at the pipeline mass / the winds pick up and the snow falls from the lake in the sky / she packs up and drives on to the next lie / she sings no god no boss no husband no state / she sings to me with a murder of crows.”

Leilani Patao – daisy

Audio Antihero

“Starting in 2021 at the tender age of seventeen, Brooklyn (via Los Angeles) based songwriter Leilani Patao put out a series of DIY self-releases, culminating in the acclaimed 2024 album But What If? which earned, among other things, a feature on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. But despite this success, Patao grew disillusioned with the biz, not an unfamiliar story within a contemporary music scene which demands not only on hard work in an artistic sense but an even greater degree of effort (and luck) be spent on self-promotion, algorithmic appeasement and any number of equally soul-destroying things. Many criticize this system but few take concrete action against it, which makes Patao’s new EP daisy all the more notable. A release which promises to shun streaming services, playlists and social media in order to focus on what really matters, and thus an experiment to judge what exactly is possible within the conditions of the twenty-first century. As Patao asks: “Is it possible to share my music properly, pay everyone who was involved, get paid myself,’ Patao asks, ‘and not have to interact with the many systems in place that make me dread music?'” [Review]

Léna Bartels – The Brightest Silver Fish

Glamour Gowns

“‘Only the brightest silver fish / Shows when the light hits,’ sings Léna Bartels on the title track of her second full-length The Brightest Silver Fish, out now via Glamour Gowns. The image might be a small miracle, over in a moment, or else a figment of the imagination caught from the corner of an eye. That we never find out which is typical of a record that does not so much mask its meaning as refuse to settle on a single answer. One caught within a series of dualities, be it between autonomy and inaction, startling beauty and the punishingly mundane, and thus open to a variety of interpretations. Even when, peering into the water later on in the track, Bartels believes she sights the fish again, the result remains ambiguous. Does the small, glinting creature she sees swimming with its family represent the possibility of the things most desired: freedom, connection, agency? Or only reinforce the opposite reality, where such ideals can only exist at a remove from our lives in their own watery, alien world?” [Review]

Lia Kohl – Various Small Whistles and a Song

Dauw

“As the artistically-inclined might deduce from the title, [Lia Kohl‘s Various Small Whistles and a Song] takes inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Various Small Fires and Milk, a book released in 1964 which featured fifteen photographs of fires and one of a glass of milk, Kohl matching not only the structure of Ruscha’s work (the album offers fifteen whistles and one song) but also its playfulness and deceptive depth. The result is an attempt to convey the subtle textures of life in a way that feels at once incidental and carefully curated, and one that ultimately adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts. The humble whistle, it turns out, is the ideal medium around which to build such a mission.” [Review]

Lily Seabird – Trash Mountain

Lame-O Records

“This album is dedicated to Trash Mountain,” Lily Seabird describes in her liner notes to the record of the same name. “A real place where I lived while writing and recording this record.” That real place is a house for artists and other creative types built on top of an old landfill site in Burlington, Vermont, somewhere which offered both the reliable constancy of home, especially via the like-minded community where Seabird would return after long stretches on the road, and a place of constant flux. This juxtaposition marks the record, Seabird facing up to the regretful pasts and uncertain futures by embracing change as a perpetual truth, though also coming to realise the anchoring stability that can be found in connection and community. “I don’t have hope for the oppressive systems that abandon us, but I do have hope in people,” Seabird says, a line that sums up the record perfectly. “Sure, the world is really messed up, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make something beautiful out of the garbage.”

Lisa/Liza – Ocean Path

Orindal Records

“’Ocean Path is a look back at the first songs I made in my teens and early twenties, including some of my very first recordings,’ explains Liza Victoria of the latest Lisa/Liza EP. ‘For me, it is a letter from my younger self.’ But more than an exercise in nostalgia, the release becomes a meditation on memory and personal change. The ways in which we shift over time, the ways we stay the same, and how we are constantly settling into who we are. ‘I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to share my inner world with others. And now I see where that lead me and feel gratitude for the path set out before me,’ Victoria continues. “Each song holds time between it, at least a year between each, love and memory, and different worlds of view, threads between them’ […] What results is the sense of witnessing Lisa/Liza form in real time, this early [release] already offering that magic, almost contradictory blend of the past, present and future Victoria has since mastered, able to offer sanctuary from the world without ever sacrificing the hope intrinsic to the act of looking forward.” [Review]

Lisa O’Neill – The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right

Rough Trade Records UK

“Some terrors are born out of nature / Some terrors are born overnight / Some terrors are born out of leaders / With their eye on a different prize.” So sings Lisa O’Neill on the title track of The Wind Doesn’t Blow This Far Right. Consisting of handful of covers, original songs and a James Stephens poem reimagined as song, the release is at once timeless and contemporary. An album which pairs a rendition of ‘The Bleak Midwinter’ with Dylan’s ‘All the Tired Horses’, and places an ode to union organiser and activist Mother Jones near a meditation on the current housing crisis. But it is the title track which stays longest in the memory. A searing indictment of the state of the world and the rapacity from which it was born. “Natural disasters devastate and turn our world upside down,” O’Neill explains, “but it is the man-made greed-motivated unnatural disasters put upon our beautiful planet and it’s people that inspired this song.” Such malevolent forces seem to be gathering at pace across the globe, and music like this has never been so timely.

Little Mazarn – Mustang Island

Dear Life Records

On their third LP, Little Mazarn branch out from their primitive folk roots into something more experimental. The core tenets of their style remain, namely Lindsey Verrill’s distinctive vocals and Jeff Johnston’s singing saw, but now there are drums, synths and what the liner notes describe as “a chorus of orchestral oddities.” It’s a new and fitting entry into the canon of Southern outsider art, joining the work of countless other musicians, artists and writers which, although disparate in style, are united by a shared spirit. The result is something sparse and sombre and sincere, evoking the both the wide-open spaces of the band’s home state and something altogether more intimate. Grief and loss are major themes, and the record functions both as a kind of emergency valve to liberate these big feelings and a reminder to hold on to them. “I built a gate for my grief to go freely,” Verrill sings on ‘The Gate’, in a line that captures the entire album, “I’m not meant to contain wild horses / I see them run and I feel their hot breath, alive. I can’t pen them in and I can’t let them go.”

Living Hour – Internal Drone Infinity

Keeled Scales

“Almost didn’t take a photo / But I’m happy that I did / Cause it melted all around me / When I crossed across the bridge.” So sings Living Hour‘s Samantha Sarty on ‘Things Will Remain’, the closing track of the Winnipeg outfit’s fourth album Internal Drone Infinity. Or rather, so sing Living Hour as a whole, the verse delivered with a communal conviction that underscores its importance to a record all about the small beauty and slow pain that constitutes the passage of time. Internal Drone Infinity is the perfect example of “what the band themselves have coined ‘yearn-core’,” as we wrote in our review, “[combining] slowcore, indie rock and dream pop into something shaded by the gauzy texture of memory,” though it hurdles the saccharine nostalgia which can sometimes haunt such music with a shapeshifting sound that isn’t afraid to push into heaviness or intensity. Because while the project is wistful by its very nature, there’s a harder truth inherent within it too. An awareness of entropy. The immutable fact of change. The knowledge everything we have will break down and fall away. Living Hour are here to preserve what they can while it is still possible, but also do something more. An attempt to evoke this wider cycle in all of its messy reality, and come to find meaning in its perpetual, inevitable turn.

Mal Devisa – Palimpsesa

Topshelf Records

We first wrote about Deja Carr’s Mal Devisa back in 2016 with breakout album Kiid A personal record which “plays like condensed version of life,” we wrote, “reaching high and falling low, crackling and bursting and simmering under the surface, at times exploding in urgent streams of consciousness as if the words and thoughts can no longer be held in […] It’s not jazz or gospel or indie rock. Kiid is everything. Kiid is whatever it wants to be.” We might be almost a decade down the line from that startling debut, but latest album Palimpsesa shows that Mal Devisa has only grown in the interim. Eschewing genre conventions to touch on everything hip-hop, jazz, folk and spoken-word poetry, this is an album which manages to surpass the fizzing energy of its predecessors. Verbose but also rhythmic, experimental but never ostentatious, Palimpsesa plays like creation of an artist at the height of their powers, but then again we thought that nine years ago, only for Carr to prove she could reach higher still.

Michael Beach – Big Black Plume

Goner Records / Poison City Records

“Did the sea come near / When you held the shell to your ear? / Did you hear the sound of the tide / Coming or going? // “Did you smell the scent of the brine / In your blood flowing / Or did you hear / The desperate lonesome wind blowing?” So asks California-born, Melbourne-based songwriter Michael Beach on ‘The Sea’, the opening track of his fifth full-length album Big Black Plume. The lines serve as a fitting introduction to a record grounded within our present moment, a reality in which any experience of wonder or joy we might find within the natural world is shadowed by an ubiquitous sense of mourning, and the true cost of humanity’s avaricious folly is coming to pass. But rather than succumb to despair, Big Black Plume pushes further through this cataclysm and emerges with something startling. “While there is an undeniable darkness [to Beach’s work], it is often sublime in nature, and certainly anything but nihilistic in its intentions,” we wrote of the album earlier in the year. “A fact made clear by new record Big Black Plume, which works with perhaps the only form of optimism left. ‘I was wrestling with the beauty and intensity of the natural world and coming to grips with the human destruction of it,’ as Beach explains. ‘I have an overwhelming sense that humans will come and go, and the world we depend on will outlast us.'” This is the soul of the record. One of both unfathomable loss and determined perseverance, where only a reconnection with nature and all of its systems might allow us to transcend the cursed fate we have carved for ourselves, or at least grant the solace of nature’s sure continuation after we are dead and gone. “There are countless ways for disaster,” as Beach sings in the closing title track. “The dreaming of the natural world will go on.”

Mourning [A] BLKstar – Flowers of the Living

Don Giovanni Records

“Released to coincide with the project’s decade anniversary, Mourning [A] BLKstar‘s Flowers of the Living sees the Cleveland-based Afrofuturist collective draw on every ounce of creativity and expertise gained across the years, resulting in a sound that’s intricately detailed yet confident enough to spread its wings and take its time. ‘Not only does space represent stillness, contentment, and mindfulness, it’s also the fulcrum of collectivism and free expression, and a key tenet of the Black ecstatic lineage,’ as the press release puts it. ‘Space has always been politicized, and to view it from a place of abundance rather than scarcity, even in a conceptual sense, is a rebuke of fascist oppressors and an affirmation of love and self-belief.’ MAB hold this sentiment as a mission statement, the album defiant in every sense, from its refusal to restrict itself to any single genre convention to its unbridled invention and confidence.” [Review]

The Noisy – The Secret Ingredient is Even More Meat

Audio Antihero

“A deluxe edition of the project’s debut album The Secret Ingredient is More Meat, [The Noisy‘s The Secret Ingredient is Even More Meat] casts a wide net for its inspiration, drawing on a whole range of cinematic and literary influences as well as the ideas which underpin and support the drag and queer communities. The result is inherently personal yet larger than any one life, lead Sara Mae Henke evoking the true dimensions of their interior with songs that can be televisually glitzy (‘Twos‘) or as intimate as a home movie (‘Grenadine‘), and moreover songs unafraid to delve into the most individual of subjects in order to locate more universal truths (as with ‘Nightshade‘ and its examination of difficult relationships). The superstitious ‘Ballerino’ and its Suspiria-inspired video by Ewan Hill collect all of these ideas together into under two minutes, celebrating all sides of an identity while working through memories and learning to love the past while focusing on what is to come.” [Review]

Okkung Lee – Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities

Shelter Press

“Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities by Okkyung Lee sees the South Korea-born, Berlin-based cellist and improviser reject the established tropes and signifiers of experimental music and thus magnify its creative potential. A style which, per the album notes, sits ‘at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque’ but is not beholden to established pattern or language, forcing both artist and audience to reckon with each composition on its own terms and nothing else. And yet, for all these ambitious intentions, the result is not some exercise in avant garde excess, be that ostentation or confrontation, but instead something tactful, modest and intuitive. The sonic equivalent of the title’s ‘any other day’, where apparent ordinariness is revealed to contain the multitudes of memory, longing and latent emotion which comprise each and every spin of the earth.” [Review]

Patrick Shiroishi – Forgetting is Violent

American Dreams

“It is fair to say multi-instrumentalist and composer Patrick Shiroishi is unafraid to broach big themes. Previous releases like Descension, Hidemi and I was too young to hear silence have all in one way or another revolved around the internment of Japanese-Americans, but new full-length Forgetting is Violence takes things even further. [The album] considers, amongst other things, racism in a wider sense. An attempt to wrestle with the phenomenon as both a historical fact and contemporary shame, and furthermore one which confronts the impossibility of living in this world without participating in its ongoing function. Acknowledging that if the desire to eradicate another is something allowed into the world, then no aspect of a culture can be said to exist above or beyond it. A truth more apparent now than ever as genocide is televised in real time.” [Review]

Pickle Darling – Bots

Father/Daughter Records

It might be tempting to view Bots as metamorphosis of the Pickle Darling project. In fact we did just that back in June, describing how New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo decided to channel Robyn, Cher and Ray of Light-era Madonna for single ‘Massive Everything’, dropping some of the playfulness and poetry of previous releases to instead “embrace the exhilaration of being wholly direct.” Subsequent single ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual’ complicated the picture, stretching the definition of direct with a sprawling seven minute slice of fuzz pop. “This new era of Pickle Darling does not jettison the idiosyncratic charm which has won the project so many fans,” as we wrote. “Nor does a commitment to forthright communication elide any sense of ambiguity. Indeed, this is a song all about such ambiguity, and how learning to embrace the doubt inherent within growing up in this strange present.” Spend any time with Bots and you’ll come to see it is less a revolution than the next chapter in a story Pickle Darling has been building from day one. An album willing to embrace contradiction—between old and new ideas, familiarity and foreignness, even the joy and frustration of making art—and in doing so go further than most to evoke the feeling of being alive in 2025.

Ruby Gill – Some Kind of Control

Self-released

“I had been grappling with what it meant to have all and no control over my time and body—all at once,” so explains Ruby Gill of her second album, Some Kind of Control. A record marked by what she describes as “cheekier, looser, gayer and even more raw” style, embodied by ‘Touch Me There’. “[A song] which examines the body in ways both intimate and political, embracing the queer experience both as a means of personal fulfilment and as a wider radical force,” we wrote in our review. “This duality is evoked by the interplay between Gill’s searching delivery and the communal backing chorus which sees the likes of Annie-Rose Maloney, Hannah McKittrick, Angie McMahon, Hannah Cameron, Jess Ellwood and Olivia Hally (of Oh Pep!) all lend their voices. The result is the sense of a call being answered. A single voice echoing back as a community.” [Review]

Sam Moss – Swimming

Self-released

“Stuck in the past / But somehow living / Out of my depth / But somehow swimming.” Four succinct lines from the title track of Sam Moss‘s Swimming capture the album’s essence, as the Virginia-based guitarist and songwriter embraces contradiction in more ways than one to create what might be his strongest release to date. The warm, ostensibly modest arrangements seem to deepen with each listen, not least thanks to the careful additions from a supporting cast of Isa Burke, Jake Xerxes Fussell, Sinclair Palmer, Molly Sarlé and Joe Westerlund. Moss’s lyrics and delivery follow a similar pattern, their gentle fondness belying the intensity beneath the surface. The result is something of a paradox, though one which feels entirely natural. A folk album that is humble in tone yet existential in nature, one drawn with a careful hand that nevertheless reaches for the full spectrum of emotions life inevitably brings. Dip a toe into Swimming and you will feel a pleasant warmth. Submerge yourself within it and something far more urgent will be revealed. “There’s no seasons left that matter / There’s no days, only hours,” as Moss sings on the closer. “And there’s so much to gaze at / In this world.”

SG Goodman – Planting by the Signs

Slough Water Records / Thirty Tigers

SG Goodman‘s Planting By The Signs takes its title and philosophy from the Foxfire books, a series first published in 1972 which aimed to pass on the collected wisdom and history of Appalachian life. The phases of the moon, this volume suggested, have a notable impact on our earthly endeavours, so anyone looking to undertake a task, be it planting a garden, weaning a baby or writing a folk rock album, would do well to align their efforts with the lunar cycle. Goodman’s record, easily one of the strongest released this year, seems to support the utility of this tradition, or at least the wider reconnection to the natural rhythms so often buried within our hectic, fatally human present. Written in a period of great loss, and helping to facilitate a process of reconciliation, Planting By The Signs is a highly personal album about the most universal of themes. Grief, love, God. The suffering of poverty and the dignity of those made to bear it. Not to mention that bond we share with the wider environment, a truth of life whether we like it or not, and the responsibilities of stewardship which result. There’s no small amount loaded into these songs, take the principle image of ‘Snapping Turtle’, where cruelty is met with a fury fit to match that of Christ in the temple, anger which only exists because of the compassion which burns underneath. This aching fondness for all life permeates all the tracks and culminates in the playful, crushing, transcendent closer, ‘Heaven Song’.

Shallowater – God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars

Self-released

If ever there was an album built to evoke a specific place, it is Shallowater‘s God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars. Following on from their acclaimed debut There Is A Well, the Houston outfit doubled down on their self-described ‘dirtgaze’ aesthetic to capture the sweeping landscape of West Texas. Six tracks of crushing weight and panoramic space where the stillness of distance is shot through with dust storms and squalls of violence. ‘Sadie’ is one of the highlights, a song loaded with images as stark and foreboding as the sound itself, its lights in tornadoes and dust covered angels speaking to the mythos of a record keyed into the sublime, though also offering a surprisingly tender meditation of grief that ties the personal into the elemental heft which surrounds it.

Snocaps – S/T

ANTI-

Way back when, before Katie and Allison Crutchfield won hearts via Waxahatchee and Swearin’ respectively, the Alabama twins played together in the beloved yet short-lived P.S. Eliot. In the wake of personal success, diehard fans have called for a reunion, though the Crutchfields are too wise to believe there’s any chance of going home. Snocaps is the alternative, a project with MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook which sees Katie and Allison reunited without forgetting the history in between, the pair taking turns to pen songs about all the obstacles on the road to the present moment, as well as the convictions which have kept the wheels turning all the same. “Give me shit while you can’t see straight,” goes the final verse of opener ‘Coast’. “I got the pedal on the floor / Or I’m slamming on the breaks / I could never just coast.” A simple reunion might have been the easy route to take, but since when has the easy path been true?

Soup Dreams – Hellbender

Candlepin Records

“Storm flooded the freeway / It thundered almost all day / Crying on the street in my hometown / Trapped in the car, the rain coming down.” This image, taken from a verse in opening track ‘Wonderdog’, captures something essential of Soup Dreams‘s Hellbender, the Philly outfit reaching across indie rock, emo and alt country to create a sound that’s nostalgic, emotive and intimate, yet nevertheless charged with a roiling energy. Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to contemporaries like Waxahatchee and Wednesday, with lead Emma Kazan’s lyrics falling somewhere between the unguarded confessions and sardonic bite of the two, though to reduce Hellbender to its influences is to underestimate what is one of the very best debuts of the year. One of heart, subtle humour and bite which captures the tenderness and desperation of solitude without losing the ever-thundering tumult of the world outside.

talons’ – in retreat

Self-released

“There’s a lot about the Covid era that I can’t get past,” says Mike Tolan (aka talons’) in the liner notes to latest album in retreat. “It changed me and largely not for the better.” The project has always been something of a raw wound, conjuring an air of desperate melancholy devoid of any romance or melodrama, but even so, this record feels different. Recorded live to tape at home with all the imperfections left in, this is a dispatch from a troubled mind during troubling times. Songs marked by the kind of quiet despair which descends at the dead at night, the anxiety of the contemporary moment matched only by the deadening suspicion things are only going to get worse. As Tolan concludes: “Things are not OK. The near future is bleak, but we’ve gotta dig in and grind it out for the kids.”

Tan Cologne – Unknown Beyond

Labrador Records

“The music of Taos, New Mexico duo of Lauren Green and Marissa Macias, otherwise known as Tan Cologne, has long probed at the intersection of the physical and ethereal, a style established on 2020’s Cave Vaults on the Moon in New Mexico. ‘Orbiting around the the titular state, the record excavates the physical and metaphysical layers of the specific location,’ as we wrote of the album in our review, ‘digging through strata both natural and supernatural in attempt to represent New Mexico in all its strange, stark beauty’ […] Tan Cologne’s latest full-length Unknown Beyond represents both a continuation of this style and a broadening of its horizons. Almost literally, in fact, with Green and Macias turning their attention skyward with the same curiosity, openness and longing which has always underpinned their work. Their search is driven by griefs personal, communal and global, the songs written in the wake of bereavement amid a country, indeed a world, on fire in more ways than one.” [Review]

Tobacco City – Horses

Scissor Tail Records

Chris Coleslaw, Lexi Goddard and pals make country music that has one foot in the golden-hued past and another in the painfully real present. This is true both in terms of the Tobacco City sound, which freshens up classic seventies country (think Emmylou and Gram) for the modern ear, and its lyrics, which compound the often confusing, disappointing and bittersweet nature of the present day with a yearning gaze at the past. Horses moves from good-time toe-tapping euphoria to solemn late-night longing, and spans comforting nostalgic familiarity to a manic desire to leave the depressing desolation of small-town existence. This is achieved principally through a focus on small snapshots of bygone days. Seemingly mundane moments where boredom breaks its levee and becomes something of its own rush, where the dissatisfaction of cooped-up small-town living is tempered by time’s unhurried passage. Here, the future is not some dark unstoppable force rushing toward you in a clatter of hoofbeats, but something intangible, indistinct. Something to worry about tomorrow.” [Review]

Tuxis Giant – You Won’t Remember This

Worry Bead Records

“You Won’t Remember This both continues the themes explored across [Tuxis Giant‘s] previous albums and expands their sonic palette. But more than a lesson in testing the borders of a project, the invention and experimentation serves its ultimate intention. That is, to paint a picture of life as it is lived, a full spectrum of moods, the shades shifting day to day. And moreover, something experienced not only as the immediate present but also a constant retrospection, memories appearing, merging and changing as the months pass by, each colouring our outlook at any given moment. The album’s most autobiographical song ‘Heart Surgery’ encapsulates all of this in one track. A retelling of the day lead [Matt] O’Connor’s mother underwent the titular operation, complete with stark emotion, naked concern and the small funny details which pop up no matter how serious the occasion. But it is also a meditation on memory. The things we remember, the things we do not, and how both of these might haunt or protect us as we grow and heal.” [Review]

Weakened Friends – Feels Like Hell

Don Giovanni Records

“Back in August we introduced Feels Like Hell, the new album from Weakened Friends [on] Don Giovanni Records, with single ‘NPC‘. What we called ‘a decidedly existential track featuring guitarist Buckethead inspired by the reality-bending simulation theory,’ though one rooted in a very real, contemporary struggle. ‘Far from some exercise in idle sci-fi daydreaming, the song is urgent, defiant and cathartic,’ we described. ‘Fatalistic, but delivered with the kind of full-throated passion that can only exist in those still with the spirit to fight.’ This attitude is the cornerstone to Feels Like Hell, the record representing a rejection not only of the myriads of forces which make our current culture so bleak and painful, but the all-too-common apathy with which so many react to such conditions. A collection of spiky, confrontational and cathartic songs, notably different from the tone of the Portland, Maine outfit’s previous LP Quitter. ‘Every soul-destroying facet of our present moment is used as fuel on the fire,’ as we continued in our preview. ‘The hegemony of global capitalism, complete with its mass surveillance, environmental destruction and rampant inequality, is enough to drive anyone to despair, but Weakened Friends are determined to deny it that one last victory. Better to scream, yell, bring the whole thing crumbling down with us.’” [Review]

Weirs – Diamond Grove

Dear Life Records

“[Diamond Grove by Weirs is] a repertoire of classic songs so indebted to the particular conditions of the moment that they have never sounded quite the same before, and likely never will again. ‘We wanted Diamond Grove to be a record in the truest sense,’ as [lead Oliver] Child-Lannin describes in the liner notes. ‘A living document of a specific time, place, and gathering of friends. Recorded in farmhouses, fields, and an abandoned silo, it channels the spirit of traditional music as a shared practice, alive with the sounds of its surroundings.’ The result owes more to musique concrète than the crisp, professional recordings of the folk revival. It is up for debate whether this represents a stylistic leap for the genre or a circle back towards an even older tradition, music delivered and enjoyed in situ. But to ponder whether Weirs exist in defiance or deference of their forebears is to miss the point completely. This is not an attempt to raze conventions, nor reproduce them. But rather imagine how folk could and should sound today. If the entirety of traditional music could be viewed as a series of specific moments threaded into a timeless whole, then with Diamond Grove, Weirs offer their own bead to add to the chain.” [Review]

Wilder Maker – The Streets Like Beds Still Warm

Western Vinyl

“Wilder Maker’s The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is a very different record to 2022’s Male Models. One even more ambitious in scope (it’s the first of a planned triptych to be released across the next eighteen months) and unique in its creation which nevertheless seems driven by the spirit of its predecessor […] Birnbaum has called The Streets… ‘the inverse of the typical songwriter record,’ the music recorded during open-ended sessions where core band members Adam Brisbin, Nick Jost, Sean Mullins improvised and swapped instruments at will, and guests including Katie Von Schleicher, Joseph Shabason, Macie Stewart, Chuck Johnson, Will Shore, Rebecca el-Saleh (Kitba) and Cole Kamen-Green added their own touches too, before Birnbaum took the result home and slowly whittled it into the form it takes today. The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s world-weary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.” [Review]

Will Johnson – Diamond City

Keeled Scales

Diamond City is Will Johnson’s tenth solo album and one that finds the legendary Texas songwriter’s style stripped back to the bare bones. Created at home in his Hays County farmhouse “in one room alone with his thoughts,” the record is inspired by the landscapes of both Johnson’s childhood in southern Missouri and the Texan Hills outside his window, painting a picture of the USA’s vast interior using initially just guitar, drum machine and an old Tascam 424. Once completed in this pure form, Johnson sent the songs to longtime collaborator Britton Beisenherz, who fleshed things out just enough, blowing on the embers of Johnson’s demos without smothering them in needless polish and ornamentation. The result is a new entry in the long and storied list of masterpieces created many miles from a professional studio, squirreled away in some corner with a tape recorder and something to say. Lyrically the album is poetic, fragmentary, even opaque, but viscerally emotive too, indebted to the pantheon of Southern writers from Faulker on down. Put simply, Diamond City is a reminder in the raw power of austere simplicity, that sometimes things are better without all their creases ironed out.

Will Stratton – Points of Origin

Bella Union

Set across the full breadth of California over a timespan of ten thousand years, you’d be hard pressed to find a more expansive record than Will Stratton‘s Points of Origin. The ambitious album is as detailed and crowded as an entire book of Where’s Wally? illustrations. Its cast of characters a Pynchonian smorgasbord of artists, con men, criminals, deadbeats and truck drivers, government men, snitches and counter-culturists, all inhabiting a world irrevocably altered by the presence of man. A picture of America before, during and after the imperialist project which has come to shape it, where fires and floods haunt the land as though in divine retribution, and a myriad of tiny struggles add up to the longest of wars. And, for the wild scope of Points of Origin, it is these tiny struggles which mark its true spirit. Each song intimate and detailed, a square inch of a picture too large to display, yet so richly imagined that they are able to evoke the full frame. Be it through the image of ancient hunters on snow-topped peaks or Vietnam attack choppers repurposed to drop flame retardant on home soil instead of napalm aboard, Stratton works with a hand careful, tender, heartbroken and seething, empathetic to the plight of his individual characters while damning the sum of their endeavours.

Wine Country – Hard Times

Self-released

“The liner notes for the debut Wine Country record, Hard Times, put the terms “written” and “composed” in inverted commas, a small gesture which speaks volumes. Because these are not songs finely wrought or painstakingly crafted brick by brick. Rather they just arrived, epiphany-like, [lead Matt] Kivel a willing lightning rod struck by a bolt of pure inspiration […] In the past he has drawn on cinema and literature, folk music and ambient music and experimental jazz. But here, in keeping with the overall vibe, things just flow where they want. Long, meandering pieces of psych-tinged art rock, improvisational lyrics that nonetheless feel charged with poetry and meaning. A testament to the value of committing to something without inhibition, and allowing the result to speak on its own terms rather than being edited and overworked beyond its proper shape. Hard Times is inspiration uncut. Not so much an attempt to communicate something otherwise incomprehensible as an embrace of the incomprehensible itself.” [Review]

Wombo – Danger in Fives

Fire Talk

“Feeling every inch the product of a band nearing ten years together, Danger in Fives finds the Wombo sound realised in its purest form, 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. ‘Danger in Fives isn’t a reintroduction’, as the press release states. ‘It’s a reminder’.” [Review]

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Consisting of Brooklyn‘s Michael Matsakis and a rotating roster friends, Collectors Item sits at the intersection of indie rock, ambient and slowcore and offers something at once intimate and ambitious. New album Peaceful in the Absence encapsulates the project’s spirit, a release full of searching questions which gradually builds towards a personal reckoning. Single ‘am i enough for me?’ comes at the crunch end of this arc, “the point in the album when the shit hits the fan and I start thinking about the things I’ve been avoiding thinking about,” as Matsakis explains, “as well as asking the questions I’ve been avoiding asking myself.” Collector’s Item evoke such an experience with a sound full of hazy density and latent weight, clouds of confusion masking the ultimate resolution, be it destructive or healing.

Evan Uhlmann – Sweet December

“An outlet in which he might grapple with doubts, concerns and hopes as they arose.” That’s how we described Evan Uhlmann‘s latest single ‘Chasing Daises’ back in August, with vocals from Jessica Larrabee (AKA She Keeps Bees) and production by Greg Uhlmann elevating the sound’s immediacy and sincere simplicity. Again released via Future Gods, latest track ‘Sweet December’ is more reflective, looking back on a young life within a city, complete with all the inevitable mistakes which come with living fast within the moment. The result is sleekly assured in its contemplation, and carries the kind of unguarded emotion which Uhlmann has fast made a signature of his sound.

‘Sweet December’ is out now via Future Gods and available from Bandcamp.

Korda Korder – What Have You Done?

‘What Have You Done?’, the new single from UK outfit Korda Korder, feels something of a throwback. The kind of act which went stratospheric in the golden age of music blogs, powered by nothing more than word of mouth. There’s very little information on the band, no bio, no press shots, no flashy social media campaigns. The single is only available to stream via Soundcloud, or alternatively you can email the band themselves to grab the MP3. The result is not only a refreshing rejection of the contemporary modes of publicising music, but also a clever way to put all the focus on the song itself. A dreamy croon which would make Mazzy Star proud.

Leah Nawy – I Was a Flower

New York-based producer, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter Leah Nawy has just released new single, ‘I Was A Flower’. Their first track to be entirely self-produced, the song serves as the ideal entrance point for those unfamiliar with Nawy’s sound, drawing inspiration from the likes of Big Thief, SASAMI and Indigo De Souza to create something simultaneously delicate and empowered. Opening with a spare restraint, the sound lives up to the title, blossoming gradually across its three and a half minute runtime, the sense of warm fondness escalating towards its indie rock conclusion.

‘I Was a Flower’ is out now and available from the usual places.

LEYA – Corners

Consisting of harpist Marilu Donovan and vocalist/violinist Adam Markiewicz, LEYA is a project which exists across boundaries. Sonically their work reaches for everything from medieval folk to contemporary pop, and has found a home beyond the underground scene in New York to grace fashion runways, adult films and more. Their first solo work since 2020 album Flood Dream, LEYA return next month with I Forget Everything, a brand new full-length on NNA Tapes which continues to evolve their sound while returning to the fundamental elements at the heart of it. Single ‘Corners’ shows how soundscapes built around the key elements of harp, strings and vocals can be so evocative and ambiguous, offering a glimpse into a record which promises to explore the avenues open to us in the face of catastrophe.

Little Oso – Metaphorical Ohio

Back in August we featured Portland, Maine indie rock band Little Oso, previewing their forthcoming record How Lucky To Be Somebody which comes out on Repeating Cloud and Safe Suburban Home in January. Writing of lead single, ‘Other People’s Lives’, we described how “nostalgic dream pop tones and [vocalist & guitarist Jeannette] Berman’s fond vocal style possess a real sense of sincerity, as though attempting to celebrate the tenuous present as it gets squeezed smaller and smaller by a variety of looming threats.” As the album’s release approaches, Little Oso have unveiled a second single, ‘Metaphorical Ohio’, another song that doubles down on a sense of summertime nostalgia with sweet melodies, sparkly vocals and an enveloping sense of fondness. Check out the video, which the band describe as “anti-capitalist baseball game where the rules are just vibes,” below.

How Lucky To Be Somebody will be released via Safe Suburban Homes and Repeating Cloud on 17th January. Pre-order it now from the Little Oso Bandcamp page.

Made of Shape – Flashlight

Made of Shape is the project of Olympia multi-instrumentalist Jona Mor who, after contracting Covid and then developing Long Covid, found himself isolated on an island, living in a cabin with just his dog for company. But Mor managed to use the period productively, writing a collection of songs that will be released in the coming months. Lead single ‘Flashlight’ is our first glimpse, revealing a crystalline and reflective brand of dream pop. Mor says the song was “born from a night of excessive reflection and isolation,” and although the focus is on missed opportunities and pining for the past, there is a sense of direction too. “There is definitely an element of desire,” he explains, “but more than that, it’s a song about a missed connection and the need for reconciliation. The intention was to create a sense of looking back while moving forward.”

MAN LEE – Best One

MAN LEE is the art rock project of Brooklyn-based duo Sam Reichman and Tim Lee. “We had always been writing our own music,” Reichman explains, “but it wasn’t until we got together that we found our footing.” New single ‘Best One’ shows off the confidence and invention of such a close relationship, with post-punk sensibilities elevated by production from Lora-Faye Åshuvud (AKA Arthur Moon). The sense of connection extends to the track’s themes too, evoking the sense of solidarity between close friends after a challenging break-up with something between open compassion, droll humour and languid cool.

Watch the video below, using archive footage to create what Reichman has described as “a mixed-media take on girlhood.”

‘Best One’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Sam Moss – Swimming

Early next year, Virginia-based songwriter (and spoon carver) Sam Moss returns with a new record, Swimming. The album was recorded in North Carolina alongside a stellar cast of collaborators, including Isa Burke, Jake Xerxes Fussell, Sinclair Palmer, Molly Sarlé and Joe Westerlund, and promises to continue Moss’s signature style of probing folk music. As Nathan Salsburg so nicely puts it in his liner notes, the album is a collection of “reckonings and wrestlings with awe and wonder, dread and despair, fragility and endurance—that manage to expand well beyond the frame of Sam Moss without losing him to the landscape.” To whet collective appetites, Sam Moss has released the title track, a typically rich and affecting folk song that feels as bright and fleeting as a sunbeam.

To be out of my depth,
but somehow swimming

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Described as a record about “fear, friendship, the fragility of earth, and different kinds of love,” Shapes addresses a nameless ‘you’, or a variety of second person characters. This carefully vague hand sees concise poetic musings blended with spare and evocative images both natural and human. Take ‘Morning Light’, a track which evokes whole seasons through the way the sun falls through a set of blinds, and with them captures the moods and emotions that emanate under such conditions. The songs of Sam Moss cast us as small elements within this wider picture, creatures with our own internal weather that is governed by the smallest of details and oldest of trends.

This timeless human spirit is what comes through strongest. Though delivered with an unassuming economy of language, it illuminates each track from within with a warm glow. A glimmer which comes in many shades and tones, from the heartfelt explorations of loss on ‘Ballad in Fm’ and ‘Hymnal’, to the almost giddy sense of fondness of ‘Opening’. With its gathering rhythm and earnest delivery, the latter highlights Moss’s uncanny ability to sound both poetic and conversational, like some old friend nonetheless granted the weight of a traditional folk song, painting universal sensations in the most intimate of colours.

Your laughter is like diamonds
Preciously shining
A sly mouthed mumbler
With New York City timing
How good to see the sparkling
And the ticking of your heart
How good to know you

Sam was kind enough to answer some of our questions so read on to learn more about the record, releasing an album during a global pandemic, and how the spectre of ecological collapse haunts even unrelated songs.

Your new album, Shapes, has been out a couple of weeks now. How has the experience been? Is it strange releasing a record without being able to tour with it?

It has been weird! I recorded Shapes more than a year ago. Covid hit before I could formulate a release plan, so I was just sitting on the songs for spring and summer. I could have spent the last six months planning an expertly crafted release campaign, but instead I kind of wallowed in indecision and then decided at the end of September to release the album in a few weeks.

It has been slower to spread than past albums, thanks in part to my last minute release plan, my fairly rough internet skills, and also the loss of touring. I would have normally booked a big tour to try to get word out, so I’m honestly a little lost on how to get people to hear it. Booking big DIY tours was the one part of the business side that I felt pretty good at, and it really is the best way to share music when you don’t have a support team (label, manager, pr, etc) behind you. Not touring is great in the sense that I have been able to move on to the next projects pretty quickly, but I really miss it. I hope I can find some more creative ways to share the record in the coming months, because I want people to hear it. I am proud of it.

It has been over two years since the release of Neon, your last record. Pandemic aside, has your artistic practice changed in that time? What was your process for sitting down and writing these songs?

Since Neon I have become better at writing steadily, as opposed to sporadically. Some of the songs on Shapes came from times where I was writing either a song a week or a song a day. Having a structured requirement like that has been hugely helpful. It keeps me feeling like a songwriter, no matter what. While I don’t spend a lot of time playing music right now, I do write a song every week, so they’ve really accumulated during the pandemic, despite my being otherwise distracted by wanting to be in the woodshop, which is my favorite way to spend time these days.

You say the album is about “love of many kinds,” and I’m curious as to whether certain songs are about certain people (or animals/places/whatever) or whether those many loves are more entwined throughout? Are these autobiographical songs? Do you have faces in mind when you sing the word “you” on each track?

It’s a bit messy. Some of these songs are about me, some are about friends, strangers, or mashups of real and fictional people. More and more, I write as an onlooker rather than the central character, though there are some directly personal songs on here. There are several real life people who could be assigned to some of the ‘you’ characters, but I also bend reality a bit as I write. It’s important to me to be honest and earnest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean writing the exact autobiographical truth with each song. I like to explore the dimensions of my mind that I don’t give voice to in other parts of my life. Writing is a good way for me to take some small nagging doubt that I have and really dig into it.

You also mention that the record references the “fragility of the earth.” Could you elaborate on that a little? With everything else that’s been going on this year, it seems like our biggest problem of all hasn’t received much attention. Do you think of your songs as carrying an environmental message? Or is it something that seeps in naturally as part of you, its creator?

None of these songs could be considered ‘environmental songs’, but there are references throughout to “our biggest problem”, as you rightly call it. Issues that loom large in my head (and the world) occasionally find their way into a song about something completely different. I guess it’s a testament to the interconnectedness of everything. How can I truly write about one big thing without acknowledging the others? And also, how can I sometimes write about just one small thing on it’s own, isolated from everything else? Both have merit and value in art, I think.

Finally, what role do you believe art plays in these strange and uncertain times?

I have an ingrained need to make things every day. My parents are artists, so it’s always been a way of life. I value the act of quiet creation and process. Depending on the day it can feel like escapism or engagement.

In some ways, it’s a beautiful time for art, because for some of us who had set our lives up around it, there is a huge amount of time available to make things. Despite the impossibility of sharing work publicly in person, I am grateful for the time I have to create. I hope that when we can go to experience public art again, that we value it like we haven’t ever before.

Shapes is available now from the Sam Moss Bandcamp page on LP, CD and digital download.

Photography by Morgan Rose Ford, album art drawing by Will Moss

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Fittingly then, we’re very happy to share a video for the track ‘Snap’ that fulfils this dimension of the Sam Moss sound. Made by Emma Piper-Burket, a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer, the video was made at the Marble House Project, an artist colony in Vermont which she and Moss both attended. Shot on a Krasnogorsk-3—that’s an old Russian 16mm wind-up camera not an alien planet—the video comprises as a series of shots from the Vermont countryside, earthy tones which really bring out the warmth which runs through the track.

The result is what Moss describes as “a small, quiet document of our time there,” The video is reflective in more ways than one, with the wistful natural imagery interspersed with the mirrored world found on the surface of water. Indeed, this softened, indistinct version of life is perhaps the most apt for the Sam Moss sound—realism shot through the subtlest filters so that the result is slightly more diffuse and picturesque.

Neon is out now and you can get it from the Sam Moss Bandcamp page.

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Tracklisting:

The New Tusk – Tarmac
Lazy Legs – Gloss
Sam Moss – Flowers
Varsity – Must Be Nice
Falcon Jane – Go with the Flow
Desert Liminal – Heavy Heads
Jamison Isaak – Sharalee
Nilein – Central Park
Pendulum Girl – crying in the carwash
Freya – Breath and Chime
Malena Zavala – A Vision That’s Changed
Alex Bayly – Wade in the Water
James Edwyn & The Borrowed Band – Pushing Statues
Tiny Fireflies – Nothing
Boreen – Halley’s Comet
Jenno Snyder – Take Care
Normal State – Summertime
Clare – Loquats
Leathan Milne – Now I Say Goodnight
John Moods – Leap of Love
Guts Club – Mustard Tears
Brianna Kelly – To Behold You
Sympathy Pain – Bless This Ugly Heart
Lung Cycles – Smoke column (Jonathan)
Be Softly – My Hands End With You Fingertips
Hour – Still New To This

Spotify:

Playmoss:

You can find all of our monthly mixes here, and be sure to check back in May for whatever April brought by way of good music.

The post March 2018 Roundup appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Now Moss is back with a new record. Titled Neon, it’s a beautiful collection of songs that sees a songwriter working with an intrinsic sense of self-confidence. By recruiting the help of Justine Bowe, Benjamin Burns, Daniel Radin, Michael Siegel and Rachel Sumner, Moss is able to create rich and affecting songs that skirt the edges of folk, rock and country, and which never lose sight of the personal themes at their heart. As Moss describes

“I wrote many of them in and around Somerville, Massachusetts, where I live, and some in further away places, where I was out, looking back toward home. They come from the sensation of home. The feeling of rootedness… I find joy in them. Some might qualify as ‘sad’ songs but I do not hear them that way. I hope they offer a spectrum of feeling. I hope they give off a small amount of light.”

The title track transplants an authentic folk atmosphere into an urban setting. Opening with sparse guitar and Moss’s signature vocals, which deliver lines about wandering around a city at night, the song grows in intensity with gathering percussion and vocal harmonies from Bowe.

‘Flowers’ has a sinuous quality, the guitars and vocals twining together like curls of smoke, conjuring an atmosphere of nostalgia and longing. It’s a song about being at a distance from another person, of falling out touch and being connected only by potentially unrequited thoughts and reminiscence.

“So tell me the colors of your wall
Won’t you paint a picture of your room
Are your street lamps humming, did they burn out again?
Are the flowers in your neighborhood in bloom?”

It’s just one of many tracks that highlights Moss’s writing skills, his lines careful and composed and understatedly poetic. These are mostly gentle songs, but songs that are imbued with real feeling, rife with doubt and hope and longing.

Take for example ‘Slow’, a song about pining for home, the guitar charged with a certain gothic energy and propelled by Burns’s percussion as Moss sings, “I don’t belong in this room today / I belong a few state lines away.” Even the sense of conviction on ‘Allies’ reveals itself to be a mere illusion, the fleeting encounter at its heart the basis of much wistful yearning, Moss’s guitar supported with hushed harmonies and Radin’s quiet piano.

‘Shoulder’ is as much about its negative space as the song itself, conjuring the image of an empty room acting as a screen upon which thoughts and feelings are projected bright and clear. And ‘Snap’ is equally restrained, stripped back to little more than voice and guitar, an illustration of the devastating simplicity achieved by those at the top of their craft.

Final track ‘Here Again’ is one of the album’s least delicate moments, ending not quite on positivity but at least a bittersweet sense of acceptance. It’s a song about passing time, about growing older, about home, Moss detailing changes not just in the landscape around him but also in his bank account and the lines on his face. The final verse ends with a quiet sense of joy, as Moss sings

“I traced your hand on the dance floor
As the lines drew heavier on my face
In the fear of what i was asking for
To the melody you hummed, we swayed”

Neon is out now on Lost Honey Records, and available via the Sam Moss Bandcamp page.

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And the usual disclaimer applies, there were too many great tunes to include them all, so treat this more as a selection rather than a comprehensive round-up of the year. Enjoy.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Constellation

“You’re used to quiet words
and so am I
so I’ll just whisper“

Tiny Ruins – Dream Wave

“always a dream wave drawing you off track
dream wave, a coast calls you back“

Magana – Get it Right

“You were red but my gold turned you green
So you stood there lying through your teeth“

deer scout – holy ghost

“I could find a new kind of devotion
I could know you by another name“

Hovvdy – Meg

“Speak because i know you feel a certain way
but ill pass it along anyway“

Bedbug – Leaving Town, Moving to a National Park <3

“I’m too young for that anyways
everyone’s just tryna skip town these days“

Soccer Mommy – Skinned Knees

“i left
burning streets in tennessee
for a north east feel“

Mitski – Your Best American Girl

“Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me
But I do, I finally do“

LVL UP – Hidden Driver

“God is peeking
softly speaking
fucking everything
until I slowly do see“

Lisa Prank – Starting Again

“You say you’re not still drinking
you just started again
I swear I don’t still miss you
I just started again“

Dicktations – Dicktations Forever

“It’s hard to say when I first figured out something was wrong“

Joyride! – Running on Empty

“Young and running on empty
you said that you thought I looked pretty with my makeup on
so I went home and I took it off“

Sioux Falls (now Stranger Ranger) – Dom

“Spending too much time on the internet
are you ok? you don’t seem very into it“

Camp Cope – Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams

“It’s the trophy wives raising trophy wives raising children on TV
Scared of people like you and me
Just don’t ask questions you’ll sleep peacefully
We will not go out in silence and we will not go quietly“

Fake Boyfriend – BUMTOWN

“Why do I cling to the threads that mean the least?“

Outer Spaces – I Saw You

“I saw you, a shedding snake“

American Enthusiasm – Holy Wow

“Make a note of all the words I cough out on my death bed“

The Hotelier – Soft Animal

“Fawn, doe, light snow
Spots on brown of white 
make me believe that there’s a God sometimes“

Beach Slang – Future Mixtape for the Art Kids

“We’re not lost, we are dying in style
We’re not fucked, we are fucking alive“

CHUCK – Death

“You hold on to whatever kin
that keeps on breathin’ in
that keeps you from driftin’
like paper in the wind“

You Won’t – Ya Ya Ya

“So your daddy was a poltergeist
sent your little sister screaming down the hallway
well I don’t know about the afterlife,
but I can help you to forget about the old days“

Mountain Almanac – Kids Playing Outside

“Saturday morning, cartoon time, let’s go“

Basement Revolver – Johnny

“Please just stay away from Johnny
cos I love him understand“

Boy Scouts – Did You See My Cry

“walking walmart shopping center
i’d never been better
on my own two feet
i guess“

Free Cake For Every Creature – First Summer in a City

“i’ll be singing when i’m 90
climb a tree to see
what tastes to smokey sweet
first summer in a city“

Haley Heynderickx – First I’m Sorry

“Mother knows I drown in my lies
Father knows I learned my lesson the second time.
Ask me where I’ll go I’ll say do not know
No, I do not know“

ARMS – Missing

“I don’t want to force your hand
but wishes disguised as plans will never do
Like the king of deathbed regrets
and the queen of last requests could ever choose“

Naps – Bad Vibrations

“Can’t stand up to the world’s expectations
I’m living on a bad bad vibration“

The Washboard Abs – Day Draws Nearer

“Your backyard
you talked to God
about the heartbreak you forgot“

Trace Mountains – Forgiveness

“old dirt you thrown underneath the stair
is right there
right where you said i’d tremble and stare
at the vast unforgiving spirit lurking there
but it takes time, to realise forgiveness“

Nassau – Desert Blues

“I took a marker and wrote your number on the bathroom stall
That’s just my way of reaching out cos I’m too proud to call“

Adeline Hotel – Near You

“Sleep better tonight
In the heat of red moon light
Whatever we are, whatever we’ll be
I used to live near you, you used to love near me“

Simon Balto – Foothills

“I’ve never been a faithful man
I’ve always been too proud to pray
But won’t you come out to the foothills
And hold me together for one more day“

Cloud Cult – No Hell

“There’s no use in running unless you run like heck
The best things we’ve learned we learned from the wreck
Jesus coming back as a woman this time
Handing out hugs in the clinic line
Someone tell the devil we don’t need no hell
We’re all pretty good at beating up ourselves“

Slingshot Dakota – Break

“And in the end there’s two of us
it was always two of us“

Good Good Blood – No Sadness/Furrowed Brow

“We’ll have no sadness/furrowed brow
There is no shame in dying now
I said from my death bed“

Ben Seretan – Bowl of Plums

“My friends call me when they’re feeling low
We talk quietly for hours and walk the room
Flowers growing in a coffee can
Our lives are wonderful and sad sometimes“

Chris Bathgate – Big Ghost

“I got a Big Ghost
of static in my throat
from coming up too short“

Wintersleep – Metropolis

“The man that you are, the man you were, the man you left
Turn into stars, flowing in through the wilderness“

Mothers – Lockjaw

“I don’t want your kind words
I want your ghost inside a thimble“

Car Seat Headrest – Drunk Driver / Killer Whales

“You build yourself up against others’ feelings
And it left you feeling empty as a car coasting downhill
I have become such a negative person
It was all just an act
It was all so easily stripped away“

Space Mountain – Never Lonely

“Met a friend today
And im feeling okay
She’s in my head
I’m never lonely“

Hallelujah the Hills – What Do the People Want?

“What do the people want?
The people don’t know what they want“

Mount Moriah – Calvander

“Carry on and on and on on
With your cosmic reach
Newport river whispered fate
Spells cast with every crashing wave
Neon lines and a new name“

Frederick Squire – Bike Thief

“The lights are on
And we are sinking way down in our chairs
We don’t say much of anything
Even though there’s still a lot to say“

Kevin Morby – We’ve Been Here Before

“Running my mouth off at the storm
Yelling, “man, what the hell did you do that for?“

Sam Moss – Vertebrae

“Did you watch my vertebrae
Slendering out
Or did you watch your own?
Stretching skin over the bone
I’ve grown
Learning to be proud“

Arlo Aldo – House & Home

“O’er the mountains out past the trees
where the grasslands, meet the sky
you’ll find me singin’ my songs
with my lover in my mind“

Will Johnson – Nervousness Fangs

“Jesus what a mess
what they’re all selling
and what’s being sold“

Jeremy Squires – After All

“There’s an old painting of Jesus on a wall
and a tapestry that hangs by a cross
that weighs heavy on my shoulders now and then
I get caught up with why the things we love ain’t never last“

The Dead Tongues – Stained Glass Eyes

“Fifth wind brought a howl got me in a storm
I saw a lighthouse spinning at the edge of the world
like looking through a window to the day
I was born“

Kyle Morton – Automatic

“It’s my head, it’s my head
breaking itself to make a thought but instead
Just some pornographic images to stave off my death
It’s all automatic“

Keaton Henson – Alright

“Obviously
My wounds are open to see
But don’t take them seriously
I’ll be fine“

Talons’ – Work Stories

“Is this what the end of the world looks like?
Or is this just life?“

Jordan O’Jordan – A Lonely Road

“There are truths we may or may never know friend
and that is the point“

Mal Devisa – Sea of Limbs

“Honey-lover
keeper of the bees
Soft-spoken
seldom-seen“

Young Jesus – Hinges

“I’m pretty sure I’m a kind of collection of things
scattered throughout the backyard
under the moon
pulling weirdo slow dance moves
maybe always losing it a little
i am ashamed to believe in myself!“

Lung Cycles – For a While

“I feel like sharing
so I’ll press record
and I’ll tell you that I had a vision“

Sister Grotto – UNCANNY

“When we go, we go alone“

John K. Samson – Virtute At Rest

“You should know I am with you, know I forgive you
Know I am proud of the steps that you’ve made
Know it will never be easy or simple
Know I will dig in my claws when you stray“

If you missed it, you can see the list of our favourite albums of 2016 here, and stay tuned for our collection of the best name-your-price releases on Bandcamp next week.

The post Wake the Deaf’s Favourite Songs of 2016 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Our choice of songs for this one perhaps isn’t the most subtle, and might well highlight our naivety/ignorance when it comes to the geographic differences between American folk music, but we just went with tracks which we felt capture the mood of Hinojosa’s work in some way. The tracklisting carries links to the artists we’ve covered in the past, if you want to read our thoughts on their music.

Tracklisting:

1) Will the Circle Be Unbroken – Marisa Anderson
2) Floating Rhododendron – Sarah Louise
3) Out West – The Coal Creek Boys
4) Fable – Sam Moss
5) Impress My Memory – Stephen Steinbrink
6) Sometimes – Noel’le Longhaul
7) Hands in Our Names – Karima Walker
8) Mexican Blanket – Wes Tirey
9) Stained Glass Eye – The Dead Tongues
10) Around and Around – Mountain Man
11) Revelation Drift – dbh
12) Dark Was the Night – Ry Cooder

The post Rolando Hinojosa – Klail City appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Tracklisting:

1. Your Best American Girl – Mitski
2. Shine – Solids
3. Vertebrae – Sam Moss
4. Joy Lies Down – Cloud (Bern Yr Idols comp from Audio Antihero)
5. Near You – Adeline Hotel
6. I Saw You – Outer Spaces
7. Madeline – Yoni & Geti
8. Keep it Light – ARMS
9. Figure It Out – Jake Rollins
10. We Learned to Cry – Adeem The Artist
11. ant hill paradise – Bedbug
12. I’m Young – Erin Tobey
13. coca cola purgatory – Ryder Eaton
14. Muppet Babies – Nice Legs (FRY YR BRN comp from Cereal + Sounds & Z Tapes)
15. Dawn Raid – The Second Hand Marching Band & Benni Hemm Hemm
16. President – Nice Try
17. SHIP – Fake Boyfriend
18. If You Let It – Sioux Falls
19. sorry for not answering the phone, i’m too busy trying to fly away – In Love with a Ghost
20. Clueless – Holiday Home
21. Realistic Birthday Music – Hallelujah the Hills
22. Age of Consent – Cayetana
23. Seattle – Tincho
24. Lance bangs #1 single released on 4/20 – Lance Bangs
25. Cigarettes – Daytime TV
26. Everything Costs – Radical Face
27. Tired of IPAs – talons’
28. Soak – Good Good Blood
29. Heavy as a mountain – Moin Moin

The post April 2016 Roundup – A Mixtape appeared first on Various Small Flames.

‘Vertebrae’ is a sparse and slow folk rock track, opening with susurrant percussion before the onset of guitars and Moss’ deep and cryptic lyrics, at once corporeal and metaphysical, skin & bone and the ever-rushing passage of time.

“Did you watch my vertebrae
Slendering out
Or did you watch your own?
Stretching skin over the bone
I’ve grown
Learning to be proud”

Fans of acts such as Small Sur and Elephant Micah while find lots to like. The really good news is that I’ve had the good fortune to hear the entire album and the quality doesn’t drop one bit.

Fable will be released on the 6th of May. If you like what you hear, lend your support by preordering at the Sam Moss Indiegogo page (including some super cool bonus perks – we particularly like The Book option), or via his Bandcamp.

The post Song Premiere: Sam Moss shares new track, Vertebrae appeared first on Various Small Flames.