Much has occurred since we first featured Adeem The Artist back in 2016, the Knoxville-based songwriter going on to earn national recognition with their convention-challenging style of folk and country, a style embodied by acclaimed records like Cast-Iron Pansexual and White Trash Revelry. Ideas of spirituality and faith have always been central to the project, not to mention the intrinsic doubt and suffering which comes attached to any serious contemplation of such concepts, so it is fitting that Adeem The Artist’s next record Christians for Goliath is a bona fide Christian album which challenges the tendency of the genre to champion decidedly un-Christian values. “There is this massive wave of evangelical Christianity in America that is largely rejecting the basic tenets of what Christian values are supposed to be,” as Adeem says. “When it’s being done in the name of a God who calls for equity, justice, and radical hospitality, that is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The confronting and urgent project was made in Nashville with none other than John Darnielle, and Rich Mullins-inspired lead single ‘Hard To Get’ is a direct collaboration with The Mountain Goats, so you know the mission has the right people on board. Watch the lyric video below:

Christians for Goliath will be released on the 11th December via Four Quarters Records / Thirty Tigers and you can pre-order it now.

Alex Gardner & the Golden Apples – Robin Hood

Writing back in 2023 of album Highly Attainable Dreams, we described the work of LA-based songwriter Alex Gardner as “a kind of outsider folk for the twenty-first century,” drawing on everything from Michael Hurley to classic American literature. Next month sees the release of The Temptation of Thieves a new album by Alex Gardner & the Golden Apples, and this time he casts an even wider net for inspiration. As the title of the record and single ‘Robin Hood’ suggest, the story of everyone’s favourite outlaw is central to the record, though English and German romanticism, ancient Greece, modernist poetry, fairy tales and folkloric traditions all hold an influence, as well as the conventions and myths of classic folk and blues. Such albums were really made to be experienced in full, but ‘Robin Hood’ is available now, providing both a taste of Gardner’s idiosyncratic style and a glimpse into the mind of a heroic scoundrel.

The Temptation of Thieves will be released on the 7th November

Annelise Eppen x An Triangles – Promise

It took a three-month silent meditation retreat for Annelise Eppen to decide her songs were worth collecting into an album, the Massachusetts songwriter using the contemplative space to fully envision the hushed reckoning that is her debut full-length Heaven is Available. Having worked to record the released with Doug Poppe (An Triangles), the album will be released in 2027, though Eppen has shared lead single ‘Promise’ as a taster. Delivered with a spare, lo-fi folk aesthetic, Eppen and Poole channel the meditative spirit of the album’s origins to offer a genuinely spiritual style of music, where humble quiet is matched by a burning desire or indeed desperation to commit to God. The result is as much a vow as a song. A commitment to living more truthfully, more receptively, more inconspicuously, made in the silent relationship we share with our creator. “This is the time to make a promise / But make it in the dark and keep it quiet / This is the time to tend the fire / To listen to the songs and get inspired,” as Eppen sings in the opening verse. “But now’s the time that I will listen / I got a little taste of what I’m missing.”

Hockitay – redstar

“A casual listen… suggests this struggle might have come good, the sound full of apparent heart and fondness,” we wrote of Hockitay‘s ‘half smile‘ back in August. “Though dig a little deeper and it seems the dismay might have just found a new focus. Because, as the above line shows, there’s an existential confusion to at play, the intimacy not so much straight romance as a kind of confession.” Now Montreal artist has shared EP redstar in its entirety via Future Gods and the result is every bit as deep and conflicted, moving between themes as disparate as AI, cosmology and personal identity in order to explore the experience of being alive in a contemporary age full of artifice. Released as a final single, the title track encompasses all of these ideas within one genre-bending song, and serves as the ideal entry point for those about to dive in.

Watch the video directed by Renaud Jacob below:

redstar is out now via Future Gods and available from the Hockitay Bandcamp page.

Michael Feuerstack – Who We Are

Over the past three decades, Montreal-based songwriter Michael Feuerstack has slowly cemented his place among the most celebrated and enduring songwriters in Canadian music, establishing a vast and diverse oeuvre and securing two JUNOs in the process. Before releasing under his own name, Feuerstack used the moniker Snailhouse, and to celebrate thirty years of work, he is returning in 2027 with The Snailhouse Songbook, a double album with Forward Music Group which reimagines a choice selection of songs from the period. Lead single ‘Who We Are’ sets the tone, full of the nuanced, bittersweet spirit which marks so much of Feuerstack’s writing. “At its core, ‘Who We Are’ is a song about being alone in the crowd,” he explains. “How do we seek balance in tending to the isolated and mysterious parts of ourselves while also digging deep into love, patience and kindness as we navigate the outside world? There is a darkness in it, but there’s a beauty that prevails, and a humour that’s maybe almost imperceptible.”

New Balance – Dunce

Back in 2025 we teased a new album from Jeremy Leasure’s New Balance with double single Lemon Slice / Pocket Change, the songs’ ostensibly relaxed sound hiding something much darker as Leasure explored “little devastations.” Now New Balance are finally gearing up to release that album, and as the title To Live And Die In LA, the theme of catastrophe looms large in the shape of natural disaster and human cruelty. Latest single ‘Dunce’ finds Leasure and co. stuck within this disorientating experience, questioning everything in the face on the encroaching ruin. “’Dunce’ came about somewhat by accident,” he explains. “Written a few days after watching Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life, I found myself singing ‘I’m the dunce of the universe’ throughout the day without realizing that I’d picked it up from a line Brooks says in the film. It led me to interrogating all the ways that I could be barrelling forward in the wrong direction. Could my belief systems be false? Am I really as confident about these things as I think? If I flipped all of my beliefs would my life be any better? At the end of the day it feels unlikely, but it’s important to live an examined life, otherwise there’s no way to grow.” Watch the video directed and edited by Hallee Morvan and Jeremy Leasure below:

To Live And Die In LA will be released on the 20th November via Anxiety Blanket Records.

Sammy Weissberg – Brass Quintet No. 1 Mvt. II

Last month, we introduced Music For Strings and Brass, the forthcoming record from Brooklyn-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Sammy Weissberg. Writing of lead single ‘String Quartet No.2 Mvt. II’, we described how the album sees Weissberg “channel the spirit of late-Romantic and modernist composers to paint a picture of everyday life in all its elaborate detail and humble simplicity.” Now he’s back with another glimpse, this time at the record’s second work, a brass quintet that’s all the more melodic and charming following the grand impressionistic emotion of the strings. “[For the second movement] I was feeling very inspired by both Yamandu Costa and ML Buch,” Weissberg describes. “While both songwriters typically compose in a guitar-centric fashion, I thought it would be a fun challenge to translate their influence on me to a totally different instrumentation.”

SNEAL – THE QUEEN

Formed of Michael Coleman, Kurt Kotheimer, Hamir Atwal, Luke Bergman and Katie Jacobson, self-described “organ donor art factory” SNEAL is a “manifestation of these collected organs in a single body that was able to make it to the studio on the train.” Which is to say, the Queens-based project is more than the sum of its parts. New album Military Time welcomes a rotating casts of guests too, with the likes of Sam Evian and Jason Burger just some of the faces which pop up, and is unsurprisingly both the most ambitious and fully-realised release from SNEAL to date. Opener and single ‘The Queen’ sets the tone, a track full of languid swagger and left-field lyrics which plays something like a slow-motion trip through some strange hymenopteran world.

everything is breeding impossibly slow
there’s not a single egg in the nest
suddenly i’m feeling impossibly low
i’m so hot
and the canopy’s wet
i’m so hot and the canopy’s wet

Military Time is out now via Baby El Records and available from Bandcamp.

Wendy Eisenberg – Mmeeaanniinngg Bbuussiinneessss” b/w “Tthhee Wwaallllss”

Earlier this year, Wendy Eisenberg released a self-titled album on Joyful Noise Recordings. The record received much acclaim, including from us, drawing upon all of Eisenberg’s experience and genre-bending innovation to present their most comprehensive and certain artistic statement yet. But if the record itself wasn’t inventive enough already, they have just dropped an unexpected follow-up, or rather companion piece, which takes two of the standout tracks and (quite literally) bends and stretches them into new forms. Closer ‘The Walls’ doubles in length, but ‘Meaning Business’ reaches a mammoth 37 minutes, transformed from what was in essence a folk song into something as imaginative and theoretically ripe as a John Cage composition. “I want to write songs that feel infinite,” Eisenberg explains. “I want to write songs that transcend their production, that can weather the changes. It’s probably a holdover from my jazz training, the desire to hear my material in different contexts…Why not literally stretch them, and my songs, out? I want to feel when a slowed-down song becomes ambient music, becomes jazz, becomes something else.”

The post Weekly Listening: October 2026 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“Releasing this song is an exercise in killing my perfectionism,” explains Ottawa‘s abijah of latest single ‘Mountainside’, the track having been written before any of the songs on the 2025 EP Turning, yet sitting in a drawer waiting its turn to be set free. “I wrote the song in the February of 2024 at about 3 a.m. in a symbolism-obsessed, half-dreaming state,” they continue. “It’s hard for me to recall actively writing it — it feels more like I lassoed the song down intact from the dream world.” More than a neat origin story, this idea seems to make up the very fabric of the sound, everything slightly out of kilter yet somehow more cohesive for it, as though operating according to laws slightly stranger and more alluring than any conventional wisdom. What results is a single that’s starkly evocative and loaded with symbolism, a yearning search guided not so much by logic as the implicit desires of the unconscious.

Adjenai – Everything Bagel

Written amid grief and discomfort while caring for a loved one with dementia, Adjenai‘s forthcoming release Did It Hurt? Was It Fun? began more as an exercise in self-care more than anything else, the songwriter aiming to soothe themselves through the act of making music, though eventually it became clear the result was something they wished to share with the world. “I was writing songs to process my feelings,” as the Los Angeles-based songwriter explains. “It wasn’t until I was walking with my mom after we spread my aunt’s ashes in Alaska that I said, ‘I think I need to try again with my artist project. I think these songs might be for someone else to hear.” First single ‘Everything Bagel’ captures the decidedly personal spirit of the release, turning its attention to the fond (and not so fond) details of childhood to sketch out the triumphant feeling of finally being out and proud.

Cameron Knowler – Skipping Town

In recent months, Cameron Knowler has been sharing a series of homespun demos, with tracks like ‘Placer Camp Blues‘ and ‘El Centro‘ grounding themselves in both a sense of history and place with their spare yet evocative arrangements which embrace the limitations of the humble cassette recorder. The final track from this collection, ‘Skipping Town’ continues the style with a bittersweet ode to home, its slow and wistful textures proving the ideal conclusion to a series all about the weight of the past and what it might offer us moving forwards. “This tune to me is related to my hometown of Yuma, AZ, the feeling of desperately wanting to leave and return to a place that you left,” Knowler explains. “Leaning into the sparsity, and being in the sunniest place on Earth.”

‘Skipping Town’ is out now via Castle Dome Records and available from Bandcamp.

Cloudbelly – Bend

Cloudbelly continue to pave the way for their forthcoming new album Throwing The Game with new single ‘Bend’. ‘Oh, Antarctica!‘ and ‘Poppa‘ have already shown the release’s emotionally resonant nature, looking to the future and the past respectively, and the latest track continues this style by looking not forward or back, but inwards. “Tell me again / Scarlet voices in my head / ‘Bout how I’m / So grandiose and / How it shows in the ways I’ve chosen / To write on my precious hours,” Corey Laitman sings in the opening verse, the track a direct confrontation between an artist and their critical inner voice. But it’s one conducted not with fire and fury but a triumphant gentleness, as though understanding that any internal pain requires healing more than anything else.

All of that brightness gone sour
Am I a coward
Corroded by rust and
Discontent and a lack
Of trust

Watch the video filmed and directed by Nick Duncan below:

Throwing The Game will be released on the 13th November and you can pre-order it now.

Eliza Edens – Hot & Mean

“While there might be a certain recklessness to the abandon with which Edens faces this new era, it is all part of deeper pact to seize the moment while it is still present. A joyous, if slightly dangerous, celebration of being alive.” So we wrote of Death Drive, the forthcoming album from Eliza Edens, the Brooklyn songwriter emerging from a difficult period with a newfound lust for life. Latest single ‘Hot & Mean’ is no different, turning its attention to the queer experience in the contemporary moment, especially the rollercoaster of dopamine highs and lows facilitated by the access we’re granted into the lives of others by social media. “The chorus is as much directed at myself than it is to anyone else,” Edens explains. “I hope we can all be sloths and move at the speed of geologic time, at least every once in a while.”

Death Drive will be released on the 30rd October via First City Artists and you can pre-order it now.

Jennah Barry – Old Friends

With albums like Young Men and Holiday, Nova Scotian artist Jennah Barry established herself as one of Canada’s finest songwriters, managing to delve into difficult themes and confront hard truths while always maintaining an overarching sense of compassion, in large part thanks to her striking vocal style. After a five-year hiatus. Barry has now returned with new single ‘Old Friends’ with Forward Music Group, and the track is every bit as lush and subtly powerful as we’ve come to expect. A song which explores the passing of time and the emotional weight it so often carries, capturing the ways in which once pressing feelings are smudged into the backdrop of our lives, no longer immediate yet nonetheless colouring the very fabric of existence.

J.W. Ricci – Realization

We last wrote about J.W. Ricci back in May with the release of Through a Frame / Pollen Drop, a debut solo guitar double single which introduced a new era for North Carolina-based songwriter. For having played in bands for a decade while working exploitative jobs (the “twin meat grinders of the music industry and life,” as we put it), he now finds himself in a newly stable position and eager for a creative fresh start. “There’s an clear sense of authenticity to Through a Frame / Pollen Drop as a result,” as we wrote, “each track recorded live with no overdubs and feeling like an artist not only reflecting on their journey to the present, but also coming to understand a healthier path they might follow from here on in.” Now J.W. Ricci is back with new single ‘Realization’, a track every bit as considered as those which preceded it, moving with a calm grace that nevertheless carries its own reflective, almost mournful edge.

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

The Male Pattern – I Was Shot in the Heart!

The last time we checked in with the protagonist of I Was Shot in the Heart!, the new album from The Male Pattern, he was rapidly sinking into the dark side of life, fresh off a divorce and thrown into trouble by a harebrained scheme to make a quick buck. “Firearms and narcotics have never been a good mix, especially not when the characters involved are quite so desperate, and an ostensibly foolproof plan to rob a small-time dealer inevitably tilts towards disaster.” With the album now out via Audio Antihero, Will Schwartz has shared the title track and closer to hint at the ‘happy ending’ offered by the release. “Our guy has struggled against the confines of his putrid personality, seeking fruitlessly for love, glory, meaning, or at the very least self self-annihilation in the form of screen addiction and benzo abuse,” as Schwartz explains. “He finally finds what he’s looking for in a shootout with police at a White Plains Stop and Shop.”

Sammy Weissberg – II – String Quartet no.2

Brooklyn-based composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist Sammy Weissberg is preparing to release his new album Music for Strings and Brass via Dear Life Records this November, and lead track ‘String Quartet no.2’ highlights how he channels the spirit of late-Romantic and modernist composers to paint a picture of everyday life in all its elaborate detail and humble simplicity. “This was the first movement I composed for String Quartet No.2,” Weissberg explains. “I used the melodic material as a foundation to write the rest of the piece, and it’s loosely based on the traditional symphonic form. The quartet was composed with a conventional structure, but this movement was written intuitively, almost like a stream of consciousness. I wrote the melodies while singing on my bike. It feels more lyrical, like a folk song.”

Sasha Adrian – Punch

“Reimagines the traditional boundaries of a love song to explore a form of relationship not so often explored,” we wrote of Sasha Adrian‘s ‘wish that i had called you’ back in June. “Namely the incredibly close bond formed between teenage friends, where every emotion is heightened and you are certain the relationship will continue perpetually.” Now the Copenhagen-based songwriter has returned with ‘Punch’, a brand new single which continues this examination of less publicised sides of relationships with a raw yet compassionate meditation on ghosting and growing apart. “Losing a friendship is a slow kind of heartbreak,” Adrian says. “It’s hard to find words for it because we haven’t really been taught how to talk about it. Do you tell a friend that you’re growing apart? Can you ghost someone you’ve known for over ten years? Honestly, I don’t know—I just know it hurts deeply to love someone who’s walking away.”

Son Lux – Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother

This autumn sees the release of Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, a film directed by Bassam Tariq which casts Mahershala Ali as a devoutly religious hitman, and the soundtrack by Son Lux is every bit as inventive and bewildering as the movie itself. Driving electronic beats capture the energy of the action, but an array of mysterious and mystical electronic flourishes deepen the soundscapes into something more interesting, mirroring the film’s pairing of visceral violence and metaphysical majesty to create a style that manages to be urgent, contemplative and reverent simultaneously. The soundtrack will be released physically by Waxwork Records and digitally by This Is Meru, and the title track is available now to introduce what to expect.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother will be released via Waxwork Records & This Is Meru and you can pre-order it now.

Stonefruit – Friendship Food Mart

Featuring Olivia Langan (guitar, vocals), Gavin Wallace (bass), Jory Gomez (drums) and Jerry Cannon (guitar), Stonefruit is an indie rock outfit based in Bozeman, Montana who set out to capture the full nostalgia and strangeness of the American experience. Earlier this year, the band released their debut album Good News Only and single ‘Friendship Food Mart’ is an ideal introduction to the side of the country they look to evoke. Described as “a love letter to the flyover states of middle America,” the song is the sonic equivalent of driving through a landscape of parking lots and shopping malls, those sprawling edge of town hinterlands that might be exciting or depressing, depending on your frame of mind.

Sweetbreads – The Anvil

Melody Stolpp’s Sweetbreads has shared a number of single in recent months, all leading up to new album Punisher.  ‘Punisher of Love‘ was “an exploration of [the] contemporary rat race, delving into the weight of expectations and self-sabotage which results,” while more recently ‘Open Mic‘ fought to keep the love of art amid the inevitable tussle between ambition and disappointment. With Punisher now finally released, Sweetbreads has released new single ‘The Anvil’, perhaps the happiest song on the record which embraces the radical potential of kindness and positivity. “They say to write what scares you most. I was honestly so terrified writing the lyric ‘You are good’,” as Stolpp explains. “As an extremely self-critical person, taking that weight off and practicing radical self love can be really challenging. In today’s world, we are constantly beating ourselves down and pushing ourselves to be more productive under the pressures of capitalism. Resisting these forces and believing you are enough is a revolutionary act. You matter because you are a living, breathing being. I hope this song can serve as a reminder of that to anyone who hears it.”

Punisher is out now and available from the usual places.

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