The dream is far from the only menacing vision Cronin outlines in the book, though it is perhaps one of the most dreadful. A child made to watch as the familiar turns strange and violence closes in, the end of the world ultimately unfolding not just with the loss of her own parents, but perhaps by their very hand. The image resurfaced upon playing Cronin’s new record The Bruise, out now via Orindal Records and A Moth Object. A release which follows in the footsteps of predecessors Bloodless and Big Dread Moon to present the personal as a portentous experience, the real world coloured by the spectral presence of ghouls, ghosts, God and His absence, but, significantly, does so from different circumstances. Now a parent herself, we find Cronin newly aware of her position as a link in a familial line. Mother and child, a pattern repeated. A chain of spectres over her shoulder. A baby in her lap, peering up, starting to cry.

Opener ‘Black Water’ plays as a direct engagement with these ideas, Cronin keenly aware of the duality of motherhood, her ability to bring relief with a familiar face or else a fanged destruction. It’s “about the poisonous kind of pain that some of us inherit from our parents,” as she explains. “I’m on both sides of that now, as a mother and a daughter.” Even the act of giving birth itself is presented as its complicated bipolar whole. Not just a continuation of life but also a form a death, as though mortality shimmers within the animal experience of pain and blood, the ever-present shadow side of the otherwise brilliant coin so often held aloft. “When I first wrote this song, I wasn’t sure what the imagery was about, but it felt emotionally true,” Cronin continues. “Two years after I finished it, I had a harrowing experience while giving birth to my second child. That nearness to death and life felt like something the song prophesied.”

With death seeping into even the most metaphorically pure of images, and Claire Cronin hardly being known for the brightest of sounds, you will not be surprised to learn The Bruise is a record dark in theme and tone. Beyond the existential terror of the personal lies grander visions of the same. The world in which Cronin gives birth is one cowering in the face of a myriad of interlinked catastrophes, from the collapsing climate, genocide and war to the alarming greed and hubris of the billionaire tech elite. There likely hasn’t been a day in human history where the world did not feel on the brink of an end of some kind, yet the contemporary moment feels especially precarious. The best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity. The gyre is widening, the falcon is deaf. You know how it ends. The fires that choked the songs of 2021’s Bloodless have only grown more intense in the intervening years, so how could The Bruise be anything other than apocalyptic? Blue Light of the Screen quotes Elaine Showalter: “The human imagination is not infinite, and we are all bombarded by these plot lines every day. Inevitably, we all live out the social stories of our time.” It stands to reason, when the stories of our time are reaching their conclusion, we live out our own end.

Which is to say The Bruise is a kind of personal eschatology developed in situ. An album inspired by doom in its various guises, be it cultural doom, personal doom or the doom of the family, its folk sound enriched by the slow black depths of doom metal and its various avant garde drone/ambient relations. Cronin’s husband and collaborator Ezra Buchla was more involved than ever, performing strings, guitars, percussion, piano electronics and whispered bass harmonies, as well as recording and mixing the song’s in the couple’s home in Berkeley, California. Plus Julia Holter (harmonium), Tashi Wada (synth), John Dieterich (of Deerhoof, on synth), Jeffrey Byron (percussion) and Mark Wessels (musical saw) also lent their talents, summoning a sound loaded with the weight of metal yet without its immediate intensity. A soul without a body, or else a body without a soul. All feeling and no catharsis. Suffering without meaning. Yearning without release.

Take the despair of ‘Before the End of Time’, a song which sees Cronin attempt, and ultimately fail, to list the things she will miss when everything is said and done. “Helicopter search beam / thought it was the holy ghost,” she sings in the song’s central line, one which encapsulates the mood of the entire album. The miracle revealed to be an optical illusion is the most galling of things, not least because of what such a mistake reveals about the would-be witness. A childish faith unveiled and then extinguished within the same moment. Pathetic desires bubbling up despite everything. The absence of the divine doubled in the embarrassment.

From there, to the creeping beat of a bodhrán, The Bruise marches on. “If anyone above has a song of love / I can’t hear it now,” goes the despondent ‘There Is No Sound’, a track which rings with the alarming clarity of silence, while all is neither calm nor bright on the Claire Cronin version of ‘Silent Night’, the traditional hymn snared by the profane as she details a childhood home, the drab, desperate environment coloured by the afflictions of those who inhabit it (there’s a “humming of mistaken words,” the trees are “a seasonless green,” the cars on the street “shine like some set of teeth” and the grass can be heard “struggling to grow underneath”). Again the maternal figure is central, a presence at once conspicuous and opaque, making anguished confessions while simultaneously retaining a fundamentally incomprehensible air. Another parent cast canine in the eyes of a child, albeit this time a more subtle transmogrification. The mother as knowing, unknowable, wild.

I remember you wanting to die
To be up with your Jesus on high
But you drove us to school with a glint in your eye
and you hid in the dark like a dog in the park
who does not want to come back inside

Informed by a celtic spirit and images of war, the electrified ‘Poison Ivy’ stirs itself with something like solemn fury, while ‘Save a Little Hell’ and ‘Iris in Pyre’ counter with a torpid weight. The tracks move slow enough to trap the listener in their lethargy, the sonic equivalent of our contemporary woe, draped like a wet blanket and clinging close to the skin. “’Iris in Pyre’ is about how it hurts to see terrible things,” Cronin explains. “I’m singing about burning the irises of my eyes, of dyeing my clothes black in a kind of funeral pyre. The images in the song speak to threats of violence, social sickness, and fascist displays of power. It’s the feeling I get when reading the news.”

This feeling gestures towards George Steiner’s idea of ‘absolute tragedy’. “A point, gathering all blackness to it,” which Cronin explores in Blue Light of the Screen. The absolute tragedy is governed by senseless villains and totally devoid of hope or meaning. Suicidal stories that play out within, as per Cronin, “a universe where hell is all that waits for us.” A world, perhaps, where even parents become werewolves and maul their offspring. Where such curses follow the bloodline, poisons pass between generations. The absolute tragedy is a wheel destined to forever turn.

The fatalism continues across the closing tracks, not least ‘Wait in Nothing’ with its arrogant adversaries and predators, and appears to reach its nadir on closer ‘House in the Pines’. “Hope is what you had when you were nine,” as Cronin sings in the refrain. “Now it’s bigger than that / It’s a white cloud when you’re running out of time.” Populated by garbage on fire and bare winter shapes, the song sets out into the bleak landscape of the record and, much like the second grade Cronin in her werewolf dream, finds not solace but doom. “Straight out of hell, I heard a bell / Deep in the ground at the back of the yard,” she sings. “I shut my ears and then appeared / some angel snake with a silver guitar.”

But while it is tempting to read the apparition as Satan himself come to punctuate the apocalypse’s final sentence, thus sealing Claire Cronin’s absolute tragedy, there is another reading which cannot be ignored. One tied to the central tension which has long proved the engine of her work. Because as terrible as the underworld might be, especially when found within your own garden, it cannot exist in divine isolation. A demon from hell is proof of heaven, just as silence implies the existence of its inverse. A fear of the end suggests a love for the present. What if God might only be revealed in negative? “The only reason I might want to draw a circle in chalk and ask a demon to enter is to see if I could really make it happen,” Cronin writes in a salient section of Blue Light of the Screen. “If the demon came, then I would know that God’s reality was laced into our own.” Hope is what you had when you were nine but now it is bigger than that. Salvation might be found in its own antithesis, and this is the time of wolves.

The Bruise is out now via Orindal Records and A Moth Object and you can get it from the Claire Cronin Bandcamp page. Various editions are available, including a limited edition cassette and a hand drawn zine of lyrics and art by Cronin herself.

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Alongside core members Berman (vocals), Ricky Lorenzo (guitar), Dana Guth (bass) and DJ Nelson (drums/samples), the new album welcomes Daniel Juergens into the Little Oso fold, bolstering the sound with synthesizer and samplers, as well as viola and violin by Elisabeth Fuchsia. Juergens also recorded and mixed the release, with Andy Tyler Clarke (Spirit of the Beehive, Cloud Nothings) mastering, and the result is by far the richest and most complex the project has sounded to date. But more than a mere stylistic evolution for the band, this development is inherently tied to their thematic interests too. We live in a world where the line between physical and digital existence is porous, machine learning is thrust upon us, and perhaps most strikingly, we’re surrounded by things we could never truly make our own no matter what the tech overlords might claim. Such heady themes require a careful balance of intricacy, fury and good old fashioned human feeling, and Little Oso 2.0 appear ready to meet the moment.

I don’t need much, I just need this
(A place I’ve never been)
Will someone please give me the cheat code to
(A place I’ve never been)

The song comes complete with a video to further the themes, directed and written by Jeannette Berman with director of photography Dean Luis Chuquimongo and editor/colorist Ricardo Lorenzo, and featuring 3D Animator by Haven.

Simulation Games will be released via Repeating Cloud and Safe Suburban Home in late spring/early summer 2027. The single is available now from Bandcamp.

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Woven from compositions that date the full span of Mia Joy’s career and recorded over various sesssion stretching across several years, Star Echo Heavy Dove feels like the most full-realised version of the project to date. A true meeting of practice, theme and style, where personal growth is not merely reflected upon but recorded moment to moment, creating an album which documents change as both a measure of distance covered and proof of the potential still ahead. The thematic cornerstone of the album, lead single ‘Wings of Desire’ kicks things off, a track named for the Wenders classic which embodies a theme of longing, juxtaposing an intimate sound with lyrics of distance and remove in order to evoke the sensation of desire in all of its burning nuance.

Watch the video created by Jordan Nelson below:

Star Echo Heavy Dove will be released on the 15th January 2027 via Fire Talk Records and you can pre-order it from the Mia Joy Bandcamp page.

Photo by Athena Merry

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Lead single ‘can’t we have both’ hints at the result. One of a couple of vocal tracks on something good, and, structurally, perhaps the closest claire rousay and zander raymond get to a traditional song, ‘can’t we have both’ lives up to its name in both theme and form, combining pop traditions with avant garde abstraction to explore the experience of the artist with a commodified, endlessly distracted world. “Feeling washed up in the used cd store / it’s a burden, it’s a triumph / my industry evaporates and it doesn’t need me anymore,” as the opening verse goes, though as the careful, almost hesitant sound slowly blooms across the length of the track, what at first sounds like fatalism begins to appear as something different. A disappointment yes, plus a clear frustation with the breakneck speed at which our culture cycles through its desires and needs, but also, if you listen closely enough, a nascent sense of possibility. If the CD stores are deserted, if the music industry eats itself, if every present trend is destined to dissolve into the next without any lasting impression, then what’s left to the artist? Perhaps it is just finding one another in the constant motion, conversing and creating, making art free from the baggage of expectation.

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Though of course, the result is not that simple. Just as life is more complex than a journey from A and B, so to does Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften reimagine what finding the correct path might look like in practice. Which is to say, it rejects the notion some map exists to steer our course, and instead views the quest from a different angle. The aforementioned single was inspired The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the connection between this iteration of Lamplight and Gibran’s work is illuminating. “That book speaks about love like an actor, more than something that can be given, taken, broken, lost,” Williams explains. “Someone that changes us, that does not soften itself when we are weak, though it can be gentle. That perspective is very much present throughout the record, and this song is from deep in the throes of learning to see love this way.”

Part of this process is learning to not only be centred in the moment, but to allow oneself comfort in the knowledge that it will give way to another whether we wish for it or not. Take ‘Clover’, a single that “seems suspended between the retrospection of mourning and a look towards future dreams,” as we continued in our earlier piece, “turning to the small certainties of the present as a kind of balm against the otherwise debilitating doubt which might set in when asking life’s big questions.” Elsewhere the present moment is less than inviting, be it ‘Altar’ with its ominous skies or the unabashed despair of ‘I’ll Be Careful With It’, yet with equal parts compassion and patience, Lamplight attempts to recognise each experience as just another part of richer, more fulfilling whole.

The mood culminates in the near-triumphant closer ‘Ring Stains’, song which doesn’t quite reach two minutes in length yet contains the multitude of emotions which precede it. For a record built around a search or question, you might expect the finale to arrive as an answer, the destination finally reached, but instead it functions more like a snapshot of recognition caught within the ongoing motion. The realisation that life itself is that very momentum, and that nothing dear to us is ever quite lost from our lives, no matter how it sometimes might feel. “I think the majority of us have a tendency to think of love as a finite resource,” Williams as explains in the album notes. “I don’t think that’s true. If love has happened, it is there, permanently etched in the fossil record.” Lamplight is here to speak of love and we’d all do well to listen. Lost he might be, but aren’t we all? The important thing is that he’s trying.

Lick The Spoon, Let It Soften will be released on the 23rd October via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Cover art by Pauline Mauruschat

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You only have to look at the artwork to get an idea of the tone of the single. Avery Friedman grasps the moment with force, even if it means getting her hands dirty. The result is decisive, tactile and loaded with a newfound purpose, as though having cleared the ground with the previous release, she is now ready and willing to grab at whatever life might throw at her next. “’You Move’ is about savoring the unexpected fruits that reveal themselves amid times of uprootedness,” Friedman explains. “It is a song about putting trust in the glimmer of new love, and carefully sowing the seeds for it to sustain. Both thematically and sonically, it’s about searching, surrendering and allowing yourself to relish. My hope is that ‘You Move’ invites people into the world of my soon-to-be-finished sophomore album – a world that encompasses a full-swing of emotionality, and lets loss and pleasure dance together.”

Watch the video directed by Dylan Friese-Greene below:

‘You Move’ is out now via Audio Antihero and available from Bandcamp. You can catch Avery Friedman on tour in the coming months, so check the dates below:

Oct 4th – Cassette, Queens, NY – w/ Mallory Hawk
Oct 8th – Antics Magazine Fundraiser @ Life World, Brooklyn, NY – w/ Lex Walton & Native Sun
Oct 31st – London Calling Festival, Amsterdam, NL
Nov 4th – The Elephant’s Head, London, UK
Nov 5th – Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield, UK
Nov 7th – Simple Things Festival, Bristol, UK
Nov 9th – Fulford Arms, York, UK
Nov 15th – Neue Zukunft, Berlin, DE

Photo by Keegan Burckhard

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What emerged was several things simultaneously—both mood piece and narrative, a lesson in sonic experimentation and taut linear pull—and felt every bit the sound of a songwriter who had come to transcend the lingering weight of his influences to create something truly his own. An achievement made possible not least thanks to Birnbaum’s trust in his collaborators, and in turn the trust he’d earned from them. As we continued:

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 worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.

Fast forward a year and Birnbaum and co. are preparing to release Smoking the Bunny, the second part of the trilogy which picks up where its predecessor left off and follows its protagonist into the darkest depths of the night. After the trials and tribulations of The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, you might be unsurprised to hear the next leg of the character’s journey descends into the near total abyss of inebriation, the city reduced to an illogical maze as he stumbles lost between (and occasionally even within) hotel rooms with the kind of abstract purpose only a drunk man might possess. Because far from a blacked out void, his experience of the night is actually something like consciousness expanded, his state upending the normal flow of time so that memories and future hopes are shuffled into the deck of the present.

In this way, Smoking the Bunny feels very much a middle part, embodying a neither here nor there sensation, looking forward and back simultaneously. A metaphysical midlife record where time feels maddeningly finite, where every hope is matched by an attendant regret, and desires are still present yet shadowed by their own failure to precipitate. “I see it as an inevitable correction for the infinity that is a part of young life,” Birnbaum explains of the mood. “One can’t be disappointed without having first hoped for everything.” The juxtaposition between the fragmentary and the linear is central to this atmosphere, the protagonist subject to two streams of experience just like everyone else. The rude pull of mortal time and an endless mosaic of memory.

The effect was in part achieved by the very structure of the recording process. Birnbaum and his wide cast of supporting musicians started with improvisational sessions which were then honed and curated. Core members Nick Jost, Sean Mullins and Adam Brisbin returned, as did long-term partner Katie Von Schleicher, alongside guest turns from Chuck Johnson, Joseph Shabason, Cole Kamen-Green, Kitba (bec el-saleh), Will Shore, Levy Lorenzo and Macie Stewart, collaborators who worked across multiple sessions to not so much create the songs themselves as the clay from which they would be moulded. And mould Birnbaum did, taking this plethora of (semi)raw material and retreating to solitude in order to cut, shape and reassemble with an array of tape machines, pedals and computers. A method strangely reflective of the headspace of his protagonist, where an ostensible patchwork of moods and past experience swirl into a unified, urgent whole.

Latest single ‘Dim Bars, Delusions of Grandeur (Room 17)’ and its instrumental b-side ‘Lone Firefly Over the Domino Game’ show both how sonically varied and thematically coherent the resulting record proves to be. Each track is very different yet dialled into the same beguilingly ambiguous mood. Take the former, a song elevated by Chuck Johnson’s pedal steel which glimmers like some burnished object glimpsed in low light, or the slightly ominous latter which plays with the unnerving dazzle of some fairground attraction cranked in an empty lot. The deranged depths of night, suggests Smoking the Bunny, surely hold their fair share of doom and regret, yet there is magic to be found there too. Even if it only even glitters at the edges of vision, and will inevitably collapse into unreliable snatches of memory should dawn finally break.

Smoking the Bunny will be released on the 6th November via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Photo by Keegan Grandbois, cover art by Gabriel Birnbaum

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The style offers the listener a more active role than most records, Bessel not so much showing the soundscape he created as inviting us to chart our own path through it. “An effort to conjure a sense of place which goes beyond traditional world-building,” as we continued, “working to not merely create something new but evoke the sense of revealing something which has always been present, waiting for someone with the patience and attention to bring them to light.” What results is an album crafted in the lineage of William Basinski and The Caretaker, where the borders between landscape, memory and fiction blur into an encompassing whole.

The album is now a month away from release via Lore City Music, and Eric Angelo Bessel has shared brand new single ‘Book of Astrology’. With the cryptic connotations of its esoteric title held aloft, the song is a perfect example of duality’s at the heart of the project. A sound brought to life with ambient textures that might be primal or futuristic, and one which utilises the tension between the withheld and the apparent to keep the audience engaged. Illusion of an Inland Ocean is a record that’s as capable of enveloping a listener as it is demanding their attention, and promises to be the most mysterious and thrilling release of Bessel’s career to date.

Illusion of an Inland Ocean will be released on the 30th October via Lore City Music and you can pre-order it now.

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With On Stranger Hills set for release in November, W. Y. Huang has now returned with brand new single ‘Afraid To Go Outside’. Again painted with a tender, introspective hue, the song evokes loneliness and social anxiety with a suitably hesitant sound. “I’m afraid to go outside / stayed in too long / now the sunlight hurts my eyes,” Huang sings in the opening lines, “don’t know if I’m strong enough.” Yet through this hushed uncertainty emerges a suggestion of intimacy, and thus in turn a delicate sense of connection. As though in voicing fears of isolation and despondency with such honesty, W. Y. Huang transcends his own experience and opens the line to communicate with others who find themselves in the same position.

On Stranger Hills will be released on the 4th November. ‘Afraid To Go Outside’ is available from the usual places.

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With the release of Howling World just under a month away via Black Meadow, Kin Hana has shared brand new track ‘Earthrise’. This time turning to the Apollo 8 ‘Earthrise’ photograph as well as Kubrick’s classic 2001: A Space Odyssey for influence, Hodges considers the human condition across its full timespan, from our primitive beginnings to the frontiers of technological possibility. In doing so, he manages to locate the yearning for connection and community which has persisted from our first days, and will persist to the last. The result centers the mythic presence of both the past and the future, twin otherworlds which loom large over the present, warping the material of our existence with equal parts pessimism and possibility.

Watch the video directed and edited by Marjorie LeWit below:

Howling World is set for release on the 23rd October via Black Meadow and you can pre-order it now.

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