“Recorded while the Canadian songwriter was pregnant and unsurprisingly explor[ing] motherhood,” we wrote of Abigail Lapell‘s forthcoming album Shadow Child, “the tracks emerged stripped back and stark, a stylistic move at least in part dictated by Lapell’s difficult experiences with IVF and miscarriage that comes to paint the journey to parenthood in all of its too-often unspoken truth.” After singles ‘Hazel’ (“soothes and mourns in equal measure, addressed to the existentially vague child, be they in the womb, the future or memory”) and the title track, Lapell has now shared latest single ‘So Long’ ahead of the album’s release this May via Outside Music. This time welcoming BC songwriter Pharis Romero in support, the track displays the maritime imagery which runs through the record, and explores love as something both elemental and haunting.

So long, my love, so long
Out upon the great dark sea
How long, my love, how long
How long away will you be?

Watch the video by FITDG, Fernando Iannicelli, below:

Shadow Child will be released on the 8th May via Outside Music and you can pre-order it now from the Abigail Lapell Bandcamp page.

Fugue State – So What Is There?

“A shape-shifting track which shimmers with a beguiling cyclical, or rather spiral, rhythm, constantly circling itself while still moving towards new ground.” That’s we described ‘Dark‘, the previous single from Fugue State‘s upcoming album, After Nothing Comes. An example of the unique approach Dan Langa and his collaborators took for the album, a process which blurs the distinction between solo and ensemble, composition and improvisation, as well as the human and the digital. As we continued: “once the ‘human’ element is complete, Langa and co. take the recordings and pass them through a myriad of digital manipulations, sampling, distorting and re-harmonising the sounds into strange echoes of themselves.” With the album now little over a month away, Fugue State has shared latest single ‘So What Is There?’ to further introduce these techniques, and highlight the contribution of Javanese singer, composer and educator Peni Candra Rini, who left a significant mark on the record after spending a day recording with Langa at the Figure 8 Studio. “That session with Peni ultimately shaped the sequencing of the record,” he describes. “Her presence offers potent moments of respite within an often dense, maximalist soundworld.”

Garet Camella – Balance

LA-based singer-songwriter Garet Camella spent the best part of a decade in the indie rock band Indigo Wild, but in the last few years has gone back to his roots, writing and recording under his own name. A couple of years ago he released Mont Michel Archives, a collection of demos and older songs that he had discarded. The release felt like finding an old box of polaroid photographs, snapshots of previous times and places made all the more evocative by the light leaks and specks of dust. Now Camella is about to return with a new EP, Just Passing Through, which resurrects five songs from his past, this time with an extra layer of polish. After first taste ‘Gnats‘, new single ‘Balance’ further introduces the release, an earnest indie rock song that hits like a breath of fresh air with it’s hopeful driving momentum and heart-on-sleeve momentum. Fans of the mid-2000s indie rock golden age will find lots to like for sure.

Hadnot Creek – A River of Love

The recording project of Charlottesville songwriter Robert Sawrey and an ever-changing array of collaborators including Ben Laderberg (Kendall Street Company), Zach Samel, Lee Sargent and Tyler Sargent (former members of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), Colin Lagenus (USA is a Monster), Austin Patterson and Jimmy Williams, Hadnot Creek has established itself as a prolific, personality-filled vehicle for good old fashioned outsider folk music. Sawrey and co. are preparing to release the project’s sixth full-length The End of the Road this June, and single ‘A River of Love’ indicates the record will continue this authentic, idiosyncratic style with equal parts heart and invention. Fans of the likes of James McMurty are sure to find much to love, Hadnot Creek sketching a decidedly existential picture of life and death without losing a toe-tapping rhythm.

Jillian Lake – Apple

Vancouver-based songwriter Jillian Lake has been releasing a number of singles in recent times, from ‘Cold Where You Are‘ (a single “equally attuned to emotional forces and their significant gravitational pull”) and ‘Human‘ (“an intensely personal song which reckons with the self in the most intimate way possible, displaying Lake’s turn towards richer arrangements while still evoking the austere stillness of an empty room”). All in preparation for the release of her second release, Is All This Mess Mine?. The EP, now released, “is a project about stopping and looking around at all the chaos around and wondering how I got stuck right in the middle of all of it,” Lake explains. “This collection of songs are all different realizations about myself and the way my mind works, the way I react, the way I feel, the way I get stuck, and all the messy bits.” Latest single ‘Apple’ offers Lake at perhaps her rawest yet, using the image of spoiled fruit to delve into feelings of expendability within a relationship. “Apple came from a place of feeling disposable,” Lake continues. “Like someone had already decided you weren’t worth keeping, and you’d started to believe them.”

Is All This Mess Mine? is out now and available via streaming services.

Leah Senior – Mothersong

Naarm/Melbourne-based “folk diviner” Leah Senior has built a considerable following over the last ten years, releasing four albums and sharing stages internationally with the likes of Wilco, Jessica Pratt and Iron & Wine. In June, she will release new record Pt. Roadknight via Third Eye Stimuli (Australia) and SPINSTER (USA), a collection of 70s-style pastoral folk and psych-tinged pop songs that explore the natural world and the variety of ways we interact with it. Lead single ‘Mothersong’ is a great introduction. Written “to ease a friend’s anxiety as she transitioned into motherhood,” this is a bright and vibrant folk pop song that’s nevertheless wrapped in a healthy dose of British backcountry weirdness, gazing back fifty years or so to a time that itself was looking back toward much older traditions. Check the very apt video below:

Pt. Roadknight is due for release on 19^th June. Pre-order it now from the Leah Senior Bandcamp page.

Ruth Garbus – I Think I’m Ready Now

Ruth Garbus has announced her new LP Profound will be released this June via Orindal Records. It’s the follow-up to previous full-lengths Kleinmeister (2019) and Alive People (2023), and it seems the album will continue the journey set out across its predecessors. Kleinmeister presented “the environment as a museum of trash,” we wrote in our review, a state which mirrored Garbus’s frame of mind. A “great drifting detrital mass looms over both the landscape and conscience,” we continued, “the past not buried but everywhere, clogging up the present and the future too, refuse refusing to degrade.” While Alive People felt like an attempt to reach through or beyond this mess, reflecting on, among other things, “creative insecurities, irony as armour and the manifold dimensions of any one personality.” But Profound seems to have taken several steps further. More assured in tone and execution, newly willing or able to communicate directly, audaciously, and, yes, happily. The title of opener and lead single ‘I Think I’m Ready Now’ sets the tone, a song about relinquishing a certain degree of control over art so that it might emerge more easily and authentically.

Breathing where the dragon is hiding is a lucky game
In the pink of your surroundings you can let go of shame
The lemon drops of failure all dissolve
And the sick of sweet pretending just a veil of gauze

Watch the visualizer made by Garbus herself below:

Profound will be released on the 12th June via Orindal Records and you can pre-order it now.

Sasha Adrian – Always, Almost

Based in Copenhagen, Sasha Adrian makes emotive indie pop songs that combine diary-like earnestness and wryly humorous cynicism. She already has two EPs to her name, 2023’s Token and 2024’s Shell, and is now “stepping into her debut album era” with new single ‘Always, Almost’. It’s a love song, but not in the conventional sense. Focusing on a relationship that has run its course (and then some), it finds a narrator stuck between the immediate heartache of breaking things off and the slower, self-deceptive suffering of holding onto something that is already dead. It’s catchy, sassy and sad, delving into a messy life with gentle sincerity and blunt candour. “Oh it’s so easy to conflate longing with love,” as she sings, “It’s time I learned to separate wanting and not.”

Suzanne Vallie – River of Angels Wings

Suzanne Vallie began work on her new record, Moonshiner Springs, during a very difficult time. Dealing with both chronic illness and grief following the death of her father, she grew increasingly weak and isolated. “It occurred to me I should document my new songs while I had the strength to do it,” she says on her decision to record demos at home on an old Panasonic tape recorder. She shared some of these songs online, and thus began a period of revitalization. Old friends and new began to send encouragement, and as Vallie puts it “my gumption got amped and my medicine kicked-in.” She enlisted the help of Carly Bond and Mat Davidson, and together they created something special. “Moonshiner Springs is an album created by the illumination and gifts born in times of grief and frailty,” Vallie describes. “As steady as hardship arrives, so too comes friendship, flying to the rescue.” Lead single and opener ‘River of Angels Wings’ is an early glimpse, the perfect introduction to the record’s bewitching atmosphere.

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