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]

The post Year in Review: 2025 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“They say it was a failed utopia / but it ain’t failed if you’re flexible.” So sings LA-based songwriter Dolly Creamer on latest single ‘Like Water’, two lines which could be said to serve as the mission statement of the song. With a loose, easygoing spirit, the track embraces this philosophy to create its own small world within the imperfect whole, leaning into the image of the title to stay attuned to the natural world and go with the flow of life. Sarah Harris, Sasha Massey, Joon Voigt, Riley Geare and Joel Crocco lend their talents to flesh out the sound, and Voigt also created a suitably lo-fi video to further bring the mood to life as part of their thunderwurld motion picture co. The result is an affirming reminder of the hope inherent within any community.

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

Erik Hall – A Folk Study (Laurie Spiegel)

Back in November we introduced Solo Three, the closing release in a trilogy of albums by Erik Hall on Western Vinyl which sees the Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist reimagining contemporary classical pieces by passing them through the prism of his own unique minimalist sensibilities. Where predecessors Music for 18 Musicians and Canto Ostinato focused solely on the work of Steve Reich and Simeon ten Holt respectively, Solo Three casts a wider net, the release featuring reinterpretations of pieces by Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Reich again and, as with the latest single, Laurie Spiegel. As though led by the title, Hall brings an added tempo and warmth to ‘A Folk Study’, favouring an acoustic palette to tease out the organic spirit of Spiegel’s original.

Hiding Places – Holy Roller

“I’m a holy roller / I move so much.” So sings Audrey Keelin of Hiding Places on single ‘Holy Roller’, invoking a phrase in the Holiness movement for those of the congregation so struck by the presence of God they dance and shake uncontrollably. Released to celebrate the Brooklyn-based outfit’s signing with Keeled Scales, the single embraces this sense of spontaneity in more ways than one, not only in how it explores the restless spirit of its creator but also in terms of its very construction. “’Holy Roller’ was a lesson for me, a song that happened with no planning, no ‘trying to write’, but a pure, detached channeling,” Keelin explains. “That metaphor made perfect sense to me after the fact, there is a voice in my heart that I have a complex relationship with that tells me to move around, be somewhat nomadic, not really settle down in one specific place. During that writing session, that bittersweet feeling of moving from my home state kept returning,”

Howling Bells – Chimera

Back in October we introduced Strange Life, the first new album from Sydney-born, London-based outfit Howling Bells for over a decade. “The album not only breaks the hiatus but reflects on it,” we described when talking of lead single ‘Heavy Lifting’, a testament to the effort and resilience required to persist within the music industry and develop a sense of confidence. Latest single ‘Chimera’ continues this meditation on making art, exploring the double-edged sword of ambition and how it can both cut you down and lift you towards higher achievements. “Chimera is a strange word. It means a few different and curious things; in this context, however, I’m using it to mean something of an absurd nature, unattainable, a fantasy. Such is the relationship we have with music at times,” lead Juanita Stein explains. “This song speaks to my experience as a musician, surviving the perpetual ups and downs of the game. But if you’re lucky enough, you have someone who can cut through the noise and help you realise that the fantasy is half the joy. That the longing is part of the journey and that our achievements along the way are deeply meaningful. At its core, ‘Chimera’ is a song about hope and relinquishing control.”

Strange Life will be released on the 13th February via Nude Records.

Ken Wohlrob – William

“A song is a stubborn thing. It’ll resist you with all its might. As you try to bend it and twist it, it will reject your strokes of genius, leaving you feeling like a damn fool for thinking they would work in the first place. A song will tell you, in no uncertain terms, what it wants to be.” So explains musician and composer Ken Wohlrob of new single ‘William’, a track which seemed to repel all attempts to develop it beyond its core guitar riff. You might know Wohlrob from acts like End of Hope, Swarm of Flies, Northern Heretic and Eternal Black, but his solo work offers space for something more meditative. And it was with that spirit he decided to drop the attempt to complicate the sound and let ‘William’ have its own way. “What I had was a single take of a repetitive guitar riff, played live through a reverse-echo feedback loop for eleven minutes,” he continues. “The feedback loop created oscillations and repetitions that took on a life of their own, extending past the riff, even re-absorbing it. There was a compelling journey in that single guitar line.”

No Singing – Care Takers

In recent years, Ben Godfrey has made a name with baroque, off-the-cuff recordings under the moniker Belaver, offering what we’ve called “a blend of deadpan humour and human heart which proves ideally suited to capturing the bleak and bizarre milieu to which it belongs.” Now Godfrey is back with new project No Singing, and there’s something of a stylistic change. Gone are the live arrangements and wry sensibilities in favour of something more considered, personal and nostalgic. Single ‘Care Takers’ introduces the sound, the tale of a character who intends to find a car and drive until the gas runs out. Only this yearning for forward motion is complicated by its very existence, both the lo-fi sound and Godfrey’s vocals betraying a sense of stasis. The stuck feeling of being young and lonely within a city which barely knows you exist, longing for any sense of speed which might allow an escape.

Sam Wenc – Limitless of Blue

Recording under the moniker Post Moves, Philadelphia-based composer, improviser and interdisciplinary artist Sam Wenc released fifteen albums across a variety of labels, establishing the sonic strand of his work as something intricate, finely crafted yet always surprising (just check out Cut Into Your Own Dimension or Heart Music). Wenc has decided to release latest album Language At An Angle under his own name, though it very much feels a continuation of an ongoing body of work. Inspired by and dedicated to pedal steel virtuoso Susan Alcorn who passed away earlier in the year, the record is a lesson in the possibilities of the instrument, one grounded in years of experience and deepened by an ongoing practice of sitting meditation, as well as a reminder of the raw power of art. Perhaps the only real way we can truly confront the unknowable and create meaning, this record suggests, is to continue the work of our forebears and never stop pushing the boundaries. Listen to lead track ‘Limitless of Blue’ now, and watch the video directed by Mikel Patrick Avery below:

Language At An Angle will be released via Lobby Art Editions on the 30th January and you can pre-order it now.

Sophie Gault – Is There Anyone Out There

We last wrote about Nashville-based songwriter Sophie Gault back in 2023 with the release of ‘Christmas in the Psych Ward‘ from album Baltic Street Hotel, a track which followed a lineage of Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and Patty Griffin to delve, as we put it, “into highly personal experiences of bipolar disorder with a tone both steely and wry.” With new album UNHINGED set for release in January 2026 via Torrez Music Group, Gault has now returned with single ‘Is There Anyone Out There’, and the track is no less emotive or evocative. A version of the Gurf Morlix song of the same name, the track preserves the intimacy of the original while reaching towards something more connected and communal. Morlix’s album Kiss of the Diamondback came out in the heaviest days of the pandemic and its sound was very much informed by the isolation and solitude of the period, but Gault adds a certain layer of warmth to create a mood that’s still melancholic but a little more bittersweet.

Unhinged will be released via Torrez Music Group on the 23rd January and you can pre-save it now.

vireo – the great golden gloom

We’ve featured a couple of tracks from vireo‘s forthcoming album The Great Golden Gloom in recent weeks, firstly ‘catching minnows’ back in September and more recently ‘icanicanican‘. Both tracks highlighted the spirit of a project attuned, as we put it, “to the curative power of the environment and the small beauties therein, packed full of brightness and wonder as though written in honour of the joy of being alive.” With the record now out, Chris Beaulieu and co. have shared the title track as one final single. Serving as the conclusion of the album, the track is in many ways a culmination of its ideas and tones. One grounded in the richness of nature yet marked by a trademark sense of invention, its bright style is as earnest as anything vireo have put out to date, and perhaps more accomplished and assured. The sound of a band who have discovered both their musical style and view of the world and have taken great pleasure in committing it to tape.

Weirs – Lord Bateman (Live at Feast V)

“A hymn delivered not from the still air and stone of a cathedral but God’s own Earth,” was how we described ‘I Want to Die Easy‘ from Weirs‘ album Diamond Grove earlier in the year. “Where fellow contemporary traditionalists like Lankum and ØXN highlight the stark, foreboding tones of the genre to push towards the realm of folk horror, the Weirs sound is more in line with the work of Terrence Mallick. Songs heightened not by an emergent dread or the suggestion of the supernatural but rather an abundance of life itself. The humblest of details given the closest of attention and the latent beauty revealed.” To celebrate the album and kick off a new tour, Weirs have shared a live version of the epic ‘Lord Bateman’, complete with a video filmed at their album release show at the 5th annual Feast in Orange County, North Carolina. “Each year in the fall, friends and I host Feast, a harvest meal and music event that spans the first weekend of October,” explains lead Oliver Child-Lanning. “This year, to mark the release of Weirs’ new album Diamond Grove, we opened Saturday night by playing through ‘Lord Bateman’ from the album in its entirety, with shadow puppets by my sister Violet and other friends and family. Everyone gathered around the glowing puppet theater as we played and sang, accompanied by insects and the fall breeze.”

Diamond Grove is out now via Dear Life Records and you can get it from the Weirs Bandcamp page.

Where’s Beth – Overtime Waltz

Following on from 2024 album Bone Broth, a release we described as “a picture of domesticity in the weeks and days around marriage,” which “for all its tender fondness, still finds room for the peculiar and idiosyncratic details,” Sarabeth Weszely’s Where’s Beth has returned with a festive offering that uses the pressures of the period to highlight chronic struggles and loneliness. “I wrote ‘Overtime Waltz’ from a place of burnout,” Weszely explains, “working long hours in NYC, struggling to connect with loved ones even when we were physically together, and feeling a vague and relentless sense of grief.” Abbey Blackwell (Alvvways) contributes upright bass and harmonies while Steve Moore (Sufjan Stevens) adds Wurlitzer and synth, lifting the sound to its full, melancholic warmth.

Is the snow ever coming, will it always be rain?
Will the cold bring numbing to take away the pain?
I’m needing some kindness to show me the way

Watch the lyric video below:

‘Overtime Waltz’ is out now and available from Bandcamp.

The post Weekly Listening: December 2025 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

With a sound described as “part pop, part doom, part dance,” Court Jester is the new project from Leicester born cross-disciplinary artist, musician and writer Courtney Askey. New release I’m My Favourite Clown introduces the project’s idiosyncratic tone, its electronic beats and emotive vocals twisted and elevated by an experimental edge. Take lead single ‘Holdem’, a contemplative track which proceeds with a restrained, reflective air for a good portion of its length, though always seems on the verge of spilling over into something larger and less controlled. As the momentum gathers, an electrified intensity enters the sonic palette to make good on this promise, the song suddenly charged with what might be conviction, desperation or else simple stark honesty.

Elisa Thorn – Idle Talk

“I’ve spent years searching for a way of playing the harp that feels true to me, and after a decade and a half of relentless curiosity, I think I’ve started to find it.” So describes Vancouver-based harpist, vocalist, and composer Elisa Thorn, whose brand new album xiik manages to utilise the full range of the harp’s potential without succumbing to the ostentation which can sometimes accompany the instrument. The result is introspective, controlled yet full of invention, marrying pop and avant garde sensibilities into something that refuses easy categorisation. Single ‘Idle Talk’ embodies the style, something which might at first sound like sonic daydream yet soon unfurls to reveal a radical heart beneath the surface, moving with precision and purpose to reclaim the female connection which has been co-opted or taken from them.

Bodies soft enough to hold you
Stories strong enough to kill you

Erik Hall – Music for a Large Ensemble (Steve Reich)

Early next year, Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall will release new album Solo Three via Western Vinyl, the third in a trilogy of records which reinterpret and reimagine contemporary classical pieces within his own minimalist style. Previous releases Music for 18 Musicians and Canto Ostinato focused solely on the work of Steve Reich and Simeon ten Holt respectively, but Solo Three expands its reach across four different composers including Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine and Laurie Spiegel. But for the lead single and the album’s closing track, Hall comes full circle and returns to Steve Reich with his version of ‘Music for a Large Ensemble’, playing every note himself and layering them painstakingly, lovingly, into the full arrangement. “I wanted to conclude this series of albums the way it began, as a sort of bookend and an ode to the process of making them,” he explains. “Beyond the interest of his concept or experiment, Reich’s music also simply imbues a gratifying emotional arc that’s accessible to any ears; something akin to a pop sensibility. The CD of his 1980 recording has lived in my car for years, and it was a total joy to transport this work into the sonic world of my studio.”

Leilani Patao – portrait

We’ve covered several singles from Leilani Patao‘s EP daisy in recent weeks, describing how the release is forgoing the rat race of self-promotion and streaming services in favour of old school word of mouth, “possessing,” as we wrote, “that emotional authenticity which marked the earlier generations of bedroom pop.” With the EP now out via Audio Antihero, Patao has shared latest track ‘Portrait’, and the result is no less compassionate and heartfelt. A song relatively restrained in sound but not in sentiment, giving voice to the experience of falling in love in all of its uncertainties and joys, and learning to submit to the overwhelming feelings of such a process. “In the most plain terms I can put it,” Patao says, “this song is about being loved really well by a wonderful lesbian.”

Natalie Jane Hill – Never Left Me

“[What] emerges is an ecosystem as detailed and changeable as any conjured on Azaela, an interior environment as mysterious as that of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One that holds the best and worst of life and, importantly, holds enough space to sit with both simultaneously, never losing sight of the possibility of change on the horizon.” So we wrote of Solely by Texas-born, North Carolina-based songwriter Natalie Jane Hill back in 2021, praising the arrangements as deft, nuanced and intricate. Now Hill is preparing to release Hopeful Woman, her first album since Solely, and one which continues to develop this style of careful, humane folk an proves what might be her most authentic record yet. Lead single ‘Never Left Me’ offers our first glimpse inside, a song which pairs a kind of domestic modesty with something bright and forthright, Hill’s assured vocals leading the listener into a world where the biggest of questions are addressed not through drastic action or bombast but rather a committed embrace of the small gestures and slow rhythms of life.

Watch the video directed and edited by Spencer Kelly below:

Hopeful Woman will be released on the 6th March 6th via Dear Life Records and you can pre-order it now.

Ohly – Not Today

“The embodiment of the project, as though everything which has come before has coalesced into a single song. A track full of tiny details and huge themes, zooming into the smallest moments of life in order to evoke the intangible joy of existence.” That’s how we described Ohly‘s ‘If I Go‘ back in June, a single the Detroit-based songwriter openly described as his magnum opus. How does one go about following up a song which such clear personal significance? Latest release ‘Not Today’ answers this question. Ohly writing about the temptation to put things off, to not grasp the full potential of things, be that friendship, songwriting or self-acceptance. “Not today, not today / there’s too much standing in my way.” Though of course there’s an irony too, because it isn’t a deferral after all, but is itself the answer to the question.

‘Not Today’ is out now via streaming services.

Robert Stillman – Reality Distortion Field

Described by label Orindal Records as a “speculative suite of jazz, ambient and smooth pop-inspired compositions that challenge the myths of Silicon Valley’s early ‘90s techno-utopianism,” 10,000 Rivers is the new album from saxophonist, improviser and composer Robert Stillman. What originated as an exploration of reality and the ways the assertations and delusions of the tech industry attempt to shape it, the release eventually became something of an unintentional concept album based around Steve Jobs. Stillman follows the work of artist and writer James Bridle (whose books New Dark Age and Ways of Being we’d personally recommend) through to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, and ultimately follows Isaacson’s anti-hagiographic lead to paint a far more complex, challenging and interesting picture. “10,000 Rivers points to an alternative narrative about a man who is tormented by the instability of his reality, so tries to invent his way out of it,” as Stillman explains. “Ultimately, his tech designs become expressions of his will to replace the messy, disordered, temporary nature of the world with something that strives to be barely physical: streamlined, symmetrical, uncomplicated, and deathless.”

The song comes complete with a video by James Bridle himself, who also designed the cover:

10,000 Rivers will be released on the 9th January via Orindal (US) and Kit Records (UK) and you can pre-order it now.

SIKADE – eleven

“Embodies the balance between intimacy and scale which marks the project, drawing the listener in with hushed, harp-led verses before the chorus arrives in waves of drama and intensity.” So we wrote of ‘body of water‘ by Oslo-based singer-songwriter, harpist and producer Linnea Vestre, AKA SIKADE, back in August. The track was taken from their upcoming debut album which gave, as we continued, “the sense of having been pulled into a portentous dream.” With the record’s release approaching via re:memory, SIKADE has returned with new single ‘eleven’, and the result is no less ethereal or enveloping. A track where the line between sensuality and symbolism dissolves, the harp and strings pushing towards a lushness which is almost cinematic.

‘eleven’ is out now via streaming services. Keep an eye on the SIKADE Bandcamp page for further news on the album.

Spell of Leaves – Defrost

“Sometimes I try counting the stars at night / Hanging out there just like bandits in the sky.” So sings Trevor Brown of Spell of Leaves in the opening lines of the North Carolinan band’s new single, ‘Defrost’. The image is a fitting introduction to a track loaded with mystery, the ambiguous lyrics painting a vista that’s stark and lonely yet pregnant with a sense of possibility too, as though some unexpected force might suddenly arrive in the night. This force might merely be the luck of a gambler, the translucent body of a ghost, the aforementioned brigade of bandits, or else the great flaming tale of a comet as Hale Bopp arcs across the sky. The band cite Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 as an influence on the song and it is easy to see why, the cryptic atmosphere full of strange symbols and existential struggle, a place where some malicious meaning seems to hang out of view, and the dead are never far from mind.

I thought heaven was a place beyond that cold seam of light
Not some distant neon vacancy sign
A pattern against all that emptiness, I guess
The bigger the cost the less the coincidence

The post Weekly Listening: November 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

You might know Jude Lilley as part of London-based psych-pop outfit Moreish Idols, but after a strange experience during the pandemic lockdown, he is now setting out solo for brand new project Crook Decker. Debut full-length Graffiti Lagoon will be released later this month via Seb Wildblood’s acclaimed label all my thoughts, and Lilley has put out single ‘Beacon’ to give a taste of the unexpectedly humid, tropical tones of a release which reimagines Bermondsey as a bayou. “It was during an insanely hot, pandemic summer in 2020 that my astro-turfed terrace became an oasis,” as Lilley explains. “The world was getting sick, Peckham was a desert, and London was a swamp, but somehow, up there, I was protected from it all. I began to write through the eyes of Crook Decker, a lonesome swamp dweller who swears by the superficial mantra ‘ignorance is bliss’ as he trots through his environment, refusing to take in the real world around him.”

Graffiti Lagoon will be released on the 12th November via all my thoughts and you can pre-order it now.

G1rldad – Biter

“kissing on the bruise / that reminds me of you / and where you left your love,” sings G1rldad on new single ‘Biter’. Based in San Luis Obispo, California, the project makes an emotive style of indie rock in the vein of Sadurn, and the new track is the ideal introduction to their work. A song delivered with a certain level of restraint, built from a tender hush that is never quite punctured, but not lacking any force of feeling as a result. Because within the intimate style the vocals emerge with a confessional conviction, speaking to the private intimacies of queer love as though to reinforce their joy and meaning.

Honey I’m Home – Insecure

“Operating at the intersection of shoegaze, indie rock and post-punk” was how we described the work of Dutch band Honey I’m Home back in March, with single ‘Wishful Thinking‘ using shadowy textures and visceral energy to tap “into ethereal moods without sacrificing a certain emotional immediacy to achieve a cathartic sound.” Described by the band as a song “about the notion that carefree innocence doesn’t exist,” new single ‘Insecure’ dials up this cathartic element even further. A song which rallies against the patriarchal structures of society with both fury and something more hopeful, its soaring crescendos playing like a wish for a better version of the present, where everyone is free to live and move the world without fear.

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

Joyer – Favorite

Joyer‘s new album On the Other End of the Line… was created in novel conditions for the duo, siblings Nick and Shane Sullivan working through separation, loneliness, post-tour blues and the perpetual uncertainty around the purpose of making music. Previous singles like ‘Glare of the Beer Can‘ and ‘At the Movies‘ suggested potential escapes from this slow crush of life, but with the album now out via Julia’s War Recordings, the Sullivans have returned with new single ‘Favorite’ which takes a slightly different approach. Because instead of distracting themselves or dreaming of different worlds, the song sees the pair confront the frustrations of making art in a world of short attention spans and a thousand new acts a minute, emerging not with dismay but instead a regained conviction. Because, as the title suggests, making music is their favourite thing to do despite all the associated baggage, and On the Other End of the Line… is a testament to that undying passion.

Watch the visualizer by Nara Avakian below:

On the Other End of the Line… is out on the 24th October via Julia’s War Recordings and you can pre-order it now from the Joyer Bandcamp page.

Lia Kohl – Voting Line, Downtown Chicago

Back in October we introduced Various Small Whistles and a Song, the new album from Chicago-based composer Lia Kohl which takes inspiration from the Ed Ruscha work of a similar name to use a series of ostensibly humble tracks to evoke larger social situations and spaces. “The result is an attempt to convey the subtle textures of life in a way that feels at once incidental and carefully curated,” we wrote, “and one that ultimately adds up to something far greater than the sum of its parts.” With the record coming in a couple of weeks via Dauw, Kohl has shared new track ‘Voting Line, Downtown Chicago’, which, as the title suggests, was recorded while waiting to vote in 2024. “The person in front of me began whistling, and the sound carried through the marble lobby, adding levity to our collective anxious solemnity.” A track only a minute long but loaded with all the context of society and history, the sonic equivalent of Frederick Wiseman’s Cinéma vérité.

Lydia Luce – Belly

We’ve covered a couple of singles from Lydia Luce‘s new album Mammoth in recent months, establishing both the style and thematic concerns of a record all about pain and recovery. First ‘Quiet‘, a song, as we wrote, “all about the slow process of learning to not only tolerate silence but embrace its power within a noisy world.” Then ‘Ephemeral‘, a duet with Luke Sital-Singh which used strings, winds, piano, viola and cello to create a sound which rises towards almost classical peaks. With the album out now, Luce has shared a new single ‘Belly’. The first song written for the album, it is a fitting choice to celebrate the release. A track which originated in the depths of a period of suffering yet nevertheless asserted the potential of recovery, as though in some way instigating not only the rest of the record but also the path back to health Luce’s life would take. “This song is about being more than the state of my physical body,” she explains, as well as “being patient with ourselves as we heal.” Watch the video by by Jason Lee Denton and Aliegh Shields below:

Mammoth is out now and available from the usual places.

paer – Power Lines

LA duo paer have introduced themselves this year with a couple of singles, showing off a style which utilises layered vocals and shimmering guitars to evoke nostalgic soundscapes full of texture and light. To close out their debut year, paer have released ‘Power Lines’, the second track on a double single which does far more than establish the project’s tone. Delve into the hazy richness of the sound and you’ll find there’s an entire world beneath the surface, exploring ideas of grief and mourning with real nuance. The aftermath of loss, the song suggests, is a delicate balance. A push and pull between the past and the future where the seeming opposite desires to commemorate and move on must be handled with care. But far from championing one over the other, or indeed suggesting any sense of competition, paer instead paint a picture where apparent contradictions can coexist. “To be everything at once, to be nothing, in the same light.”

Rainwater – Bluebelly

Yesturday & Tamarlow, the new record from Rainwater sits at a crossroads between terror and wonder. Written following the birth of lead Blake Luley’s first daughter, the record explores both the anxieties and joys of parenthood, particularly its bewildering early days. All this is delivered in a style Luley sums up as “Arthur Russell fronting a 2000s era indie rock band,” proving the perfect vehicle as it slides from gently dreamy indie pop to taut indie rockers like single ‘Shadow’ which, as we described in a preview “sees the project lean further towards post-punk than ever before.” Today we’re focusing on ‘Bluebelly’, a lush and romantic look at the “devoured days” of a new baby which captures the record’s ethos perfectly. As Glen Boudin’s perceptive liner notes put it: “Becoming a parent is scary, a radical recontextualization of your entire life, but it’s also a beautiful, mysterious encounter with infinite love.”

Snocaps – Heathcliff

It can be easy to forget Katie and Allison Crutchfield started out their careers in collaboration, the Alabama twins winning acclaim in the beloved yet short-lived P.S. Eliot before going onto bigger things with Waxahatchee and Swearin’ respectively. So it is extra satisfying to see things come full circle with the surprise announcement of new project Snocaps. Comprised of the Crutchfields plus MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook, the project offers a new vehicle for them to explore the overlaps and divergences of their different solo paths. Their self-titled album shadow dropped via ANTI- on Halloween so there’s plenty to dig into, but where better to start than a track named after everyone’s favourite orange cat?

Tim Heidecker – Alone Until I’m Home

Last month we introduced Passages: Artists in Solidarity with Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers, coming this December via Western Vinyl in support of Texas-based organisations, American Gateways and Casa Marianella. Produced and organised by Emilie Rex and Rick Alverson in response to the precarity and cruelty of the present moment,” we wrote, “Passages is a new project which asked artists to write and record a song in a place that feels like home.” A huge range of artists are involved, with the offerings from Alan Sparhawk and Benjamin Booker released as early singles to hint at the compassion and solidarity of the release. Now Western Vinyl have unveiled Tim Heidecker‘s similarly heartfelt ‘Alone Until I’m Home’. The compilation’s closing track and in many ways an embodiment of its message, the song is a lucid, sincere ballad for all those travelling or displaced, be they hoping to return home or else find a new place which might, in time, come to feel like one.

Van Chamberlain – Miracle Drug

Over the coming months, Brooklyn‘s Van Chamberlain will be sharing their second album As Far As the Eye Can See, a planned ‘waterfall release’ where a new single is shared month by month until the entire thing is released. Oh and five two-song cassettes will drop in-sync with the singles and videos too. For now, we have our first taste of the record with ‘Miracle Drug’, a lush track pitched somewhere between the dreamy haze of dream pop and something more jangly and bright. The result is decidedly bittersweet in nature, a nascent crush brought to life in all of its longing and shimmering potential. Where the line between melancholy and possibility is porous and the world itself feels new.

Watch the video below, conceived, directed and edited by Ricky Lewis with cinematography and color by Tony Carter and production support by David Olmsted:

‘Miracle Drug’ is out now and available from Bandcamp. As Far As the Eye Can See is coming soon.

The post Weekly Listening: November 2025 #1 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The release will be available via Western Vinyl both digital and on vinyl, including a limited deluxe edition which includes liner notes by 2024 National Book Award winner Jason De León (Soldiers and Kings) and poetry from National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Ross Gay (Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude). Both editions of the vinyl include photography from Pulitzer Foundation Grant Awardee Greg Constantine and cover art by Reena Saini Kallat, which is taken from the series Ruled Paper (red, blue, white) which depicts contested geographies around the world. All proceeds will be shared between two Texas-based organisations, American Gateways and Casa Marianella, who provide all manner of support for immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, including food, shelter, access to health care, legal services and other essential things. Plus, on the 4th December, Tim Heidecker will host a live variety show and raffle/auction on his call-in show Office Hours to further support the two organisations.

In preview of the December release, the offerings of Alan Sparhawk and Benjamin Booker have been made available to stream. Both offered statements to explain the context behind the tracks. “Here is a song that came from the struggle to know what to say to someone who is having a hard time,” Sparhawk explains of his song ‘No More Darkness’. “There are real things that we can do to lift each other out of suffering—sometimes it is tangible charity, like this compilation to raise funds and awareness for the plight of immigrants and those who have been displaced. Sometimes it is words of encouragement. It can also just be time spent with someone who needs help getting through the moment. Let’s do our best to turn up the light.”

Fittingly for the compilation’s themes, Booker’s track ‘A Place for Us’ is warm, welcoming and nakedly emotive. Lucid whispered truths over gentle but stark guitar. “The human struggle is a family struggle,” he explains of its ethos. “We rise together and we suffer together. There are so many things out of our control, but we can always open our hearts to love and understanding. May you find light in the darkness.”

Passages: Artists in Solidarity with Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers will be released on the 5th December via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

The post Passages: Artists in Solidarity with Immigrants, Refugees, and Asylum Seekers appeared first on Various Small Flames.

With the release of the album imminent on Western Vinyl, Shrunken Elvis have returned with new single ‘Marina Pt. 2’. Representative of the album’s kosmische spirit, the song highlights both the elaborate detail and expansive space of the project, its washes of ambient textures like a canvas across which the intricacies of the sound can play. The result unfurls like a widening spiral, drawing in new energies as it progresses, be that the dappled synths and lucent guitar of the opening minutes or the more discordant, rugged crescendo which starts to build around halfway through. Then, once the climax has passed, the song closes back in on itself along the same orbit. Something coaxed to life by intuition and powered by its own momentum. A moment of wonder, however brief, opened up in the world.

The post Shrunken Elvis – Marina Pt. 2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

“In my body / On my skin / In the cool October wind / You’re there.” So sings country girl on ‘miracle’, a brand new single out now via FADER Label. Following on from debut EP meet me at the fountain, a richly nostalgic release we described as “reflecting on the joys of a rose-tinted past, looking to preserve that sense of possibility and fun in the face of life’s inevitable progression,” the new track again offers an earnest if dusky sound which presents the on-set of autumn as something to be celebrated. As though, having been battered by a summer heat for months, the October winds promise to arrive as something of a balm, country girl’s trademark fondness transforming what might normally be considered a melancholic time into something to be savoured.

‘miracle’ is out now via FADER Label and available from the usual places.

Greg Freeman – Salesman

The word-of-mouth success of 2022 debut I Looked Out earned Burlington, Vermont-based artist Greg Freeman something of a cult following. His twangy style of indie rock, evocative songwriting and strong sense of place that reflects his home of the northeastern US won lots of fans, and expectations for his sophomore album Burnover, released last week via Canvasback Music and Transgressive Records have been sky high. A steady stream of solid singles, like the “assured and surprising verbose” ‘Curtain’ allayed any concerns of a sophomore slump, and final single ‘Salesman’ is further proof that Freeman is firing on all cylinders. What he describes as “technically a serious song about something sad,” it’s actually one of the record’s livelier tracks, recorded almost entirely live with Freeman’s touring band to capture a sense of immediate energy.

Home Videos – the devil’s credit score

Described as “a tape obsessed band of slackers,” Rochester’s Home Videos has evolved across its lifetime. Debut EP (the fittingly titled EP) featured nothing but two acoustic guitars, a four track recorder and a whole lot of tape hiss, though the project has gradually blossomed into a full band. New album Home Taping is Killing Music, recently released via Raincoated Records, shows just what this change means, Home Videos retaining the intimacy that marked their early material but now capable of far greater depth. A reimagining of a track from the prior EP, single ‘the devil’s credit score’ offers the perfect comparison. None of the texture or tenderness is lost, but where the original never puntured its fuzzy wrappings, this version of the song carries a tangible weight, the emo underpinnings of the Home Videos sound fully apparent as the song rises towards its big, cathartic climax.

Jacob Faurholt – Painfully Alone

The first single from his forthcoming self-titled new album, ‘Painfully Alone’ finds Danish songwriter Jacob Faurholt stripping things back to the bare bones. Ever prolific, Faurholt has been making music for decades, releasing twelve records under his own name alongside work with experimental project Crystal Shipsss and Danish language outlet Statisk Støj. But the new album sees him breaking new ground. Recorded in “the quiet corners of his home studio,” it finds him at his most restrained and vulnerable, resulting in what he describes as “an intimate portrait of existential dread, inner turmoil, and fragile love.” ‘Painfully Alone’ proves the perfect introduction, a stark and intimate affair that builds from plucked guitar and Faurholt’s solitary vocals into something almost romantic, as his wife adds her voice too and they sing together “Alone, with you.”

Jacob Faurholt will be released later this year. Keep an eye on his Bandcamp page for updates.

Lydia Luce – Quiet

Born in Fort Lauderdale and now based in Nashville via Boston and LA, Lydia Luce has been on something of a journey in life, though her forthcoming full-length Mammoth centres on a journey of a different kind. One, that is, out of suffering, charting the path of recovery from chronic pain and the hard-won bonds which came with it. Lead single ‘Quiet’ embodies the tenderness with which Luce takes on this challenge. A song all about the slow process of learning to not only tolerate silence but embrace its power within a noisy world. Be that finding healing in the stillness of nature or coming to appreciate the beauty of sitting in quiet with the people you love. Watch a performance of the track below, with Luce supported by Lockeland Strings to bring the track’s subtle power to life.

Mammoth will be released on the 30th October and you can pre-order it now.

Mappe Of – Terraforming Moons

We are inching closer to the release of Afterglades, the new record from Mappe Of (the project of Toronto singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Tom Meikle). Following the weighty ‘A Scourge Laid Upon The Earth’, which we wrote about back in June, Meikle has unveiled another single ahead of the record’s September release date. Titled ‘Terraforming Moons’, it’s a song that takes very personal difficulties and sends them spinning into the cosmos, a gentle, folk-inflected indie pop song with an almost sci-fi twist. “A few years ago my partner got really sick,” Meikle explains. “I felt helpless, despite doing everything I could to make things better. I thought there was something romantic and terrifying about the idea of going as far as terraforming a planet to create the right conditions for a person you love to live.”

Ny Oh – Aperture

It is fair to say UK-born, NZ-raised and LA-based songwriter Ny Oh has travelled a lot across her life and career. Be it fronting jazz outfit Neon Gru, collaborating with the likes of Margo Price and Madison Cunningham or performing as part of Harry Styles’s band across stadium tours. But her new single ‘Aperture’ is all about coming home. Written in Aotearoa and developed with producer Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Angel Olsen, Conor Oberst), the song unfurls with the distinctive mix of dreaminess and clarity that any place dear to the heart comes to possess. “I deserved a glove touch / Softness played it school yard rough,” Oh sings in one verse, balancing the allure of the familiar in all of its soft comfort and with a tactile level of detail. “Light flooded in / Gentle and warm / Reveal where I came from.” Watch the video by Victor Grossling and Anna Anderson below:

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

Patrick Shiroishi – Mountains that take wing

“An attempt to wrestle with [racism] 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.” So we wrote of Forgetting is Violent, the new album from Patrick Shiroishi forthcoming next month via American Dreams Records. Lead single ‘There is no moment in my life in which this is not happening’ offered what we described as “a window into the poignant and evocative sound which results,” and new single ‘Mountains that take wing’ is every bit as striking as its predecessor, as Gemma Thompson (Savages) and Aaron Turner (SUMAC, ISIS) join Shiroishi to conjure a sound which ebbs and flows between fierce intensity and elegiac quiet.

Forgetting is Violent is out on the 19th September via American Dreams Records and you can pre-order it now from the Patrick Shiroishi Bandcamp page.

Pickle Darling – Congratulations Champion

We have written about Pickle Darling a couple of times in recent months, songs which heralded a new era for Aotearoa/New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo. First the Robyn, Cher and Madonna-inspired pop gem ‘Massive Everything’, what we called “a love song with all the complications left in,” then the sprawling ‘Human Bean Instruction Manual‘. “A track perhaps not direct in terms of style,” we wrote, “but every bit as forthright as its predecessor when it comes to the message it carries,” urging us to stand together against the multitude of threats which haunt our present moment. With the album’s release via Father/Daughter Records a matter of weeks away, Pickle Darling is back with ‘Congratulations Champion’, a sub-ninety-second single which might sit at the opposite end of the spectrum in terms of runtime yet nevertheless packs an equal emotional punch. A collage of lines collected from Mayo’s phone, the song pieces together incomplete, ostensibly mismatched thoughts into a satisfying whole. “An Oscar for Jane Campion / I found a note written in crumbs inside a biscuit tin,” as one couplet goes. Or the final verse, which sums up the strange, playful and completely sincere style of Bots as a whole:

You know i’m gonna love you still
Like black mould loves the window sill
Like oceans love an oil spill
Like ducks towards an air rifle

Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats – Departed Bird

“A snapshot of a group of musicians pitched together for a short window of time, subject to the small moments of chance and happenstance and all the more special for it.” That’s how we described Wao, the forthcoming album by Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats back in July, writing of how the outfit—Joseph Shabason, Nicholas Krgovich and Saya and Takashi Ueno of Tenniscoats—embrace ephemerality and imperfection. With the album set for release at the end of the week via Western Vinyl, the quartet have shared new single ‘Departed Bird’. The opening track of the record which highlights the mix of melancholy and magic which marks a release able to conjure wonder at the simplest of things.

Watch the visualizer below, shot at at Guggenheim House in Kobe, Japan:

Wao will be released on the 29th August via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Silver Synthetic – Happy Ever After

Back in March, Silver Synthetic released their second full-length Rosalie on Curation Records, an album which saw the New Orleans outfit push the self-described ‘Home Fi’ style of their debut (a self-titled LP released with Third Man Records in 2021) towards the full richness and confidence of classic indie rock. The label had wanted the specific song ‘Happy Ever After’ to be the lead single, though the band themselves feared the track was something of an outlier and ended up not featuring it on the record at all. Whether or not that was an error, you can now decide for yourself, because fast forward several months Silver Synthetic have released the track as part of a double single, Happy Ever After / Say The Wrong Word. Charged with the same sunny swagger that marked Rosalie, ‘Happy Ever After’ couldn’t have been timed better, the peppy rhythms, smooth delivery and slight pysch wooze combining into the ideal soundtrack to which to milk these last weeks of summer.

SQORE – INTERNAL///VS.EXTERNAL[forces]

Recording under the moniker SQORE, New York-based producer, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist Em Sgouros blends field recordings with synthesized sounds to create small worlds of their own. Last week saw the release of reGENERATION, the sophomore SQORE EP, via Ambient Pasta, a collection of three tracks they say “explore the struggle of generating a new reality within yourself in the midst of fear and anger and ask as humans, ‘what are we capable of?'” Centrepiece ‘INTERNAL///VS.EXTERNAL[forces]’ is a good place to start, a song which sees field samples and drones play across waves of digital strings and flourishing arpeggios, resulting in something that feels part organic and part virtual. The track confronts fear and the strangling grip it can hold on both a personal and societal level, offering a sense of meditative understanding as a path towards joy and the regeneration of the record’s title.

The post Weekly Listening: August 2025 #4 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

The recording project of Teague Cullen and various friends, Foot Ox has made a name with an experimental style of folk, exploring age-old themes of love, loss and longing with rich arrangements and surreal storytelling. Written during extensive travels of the West, new album A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes (forthcoming via Ernest Jenning Record Co.) utilises a genre-spanning style to reckon with the past and present of the area, and ultimately how the mythology of the American West shifts and persists. Following previous single ‘Horseshoe‘, new track ‘Bed of Violets’ shows the nuanced, layered nature of the record, able to recognise the beauty of the landscape while confronting the malevolent forces which haunt it. “‘Bed of Violets’ is a pretty dark song for me, even if it doesn’t seem that way on the surface,” Cullen explains. “It’s about the struggle of facing a dark force in life and overcoming it. Even though the lyrics themselves might not be overtly hopeful, I feel like the orchestration and the strings bring a sense of something vast and beautiful.”

A Lighthouse with Silver Dog Eyes out on the 11th August via Ernest Jenning Record Co. and you can pre-order it now.

General Absurdity & the Open Source – Limestone Ghost

A self-described “CommUNITY Psych-Folk Music Rebel, Performance ARTeest, Pre/Post Historic Bluez, Multi-dimensional BEeing,” General Absurdity & the Open Source is the new project/alter ego of  Lexington, Kentucky songwriter Derek Feldman. Long time readers might recognise Feldman as Doc Feldman, who we last wrote about back in 2021 with the release of A Healthy Dose of Anxiety, an album recorded with full band Doc Feldman & the Alt + Cntry + Delete. “Progressing with what might at first seem like pessimism, decrying magic spells and empty prayers, [single ‘‘Receiving (for Rollo May)’] repurposes such disillusionment into human solidarity,” we described. “Clasping hands not in plea to God but to pull another out of the shit. If we have control over anything, it is what happens here around us.” The mystical bent of General Absurdity & the Open Source might indicate a brand new stage for Feldman, yet this core message remains. Folk music which belongs alongside contemporaries like Will Johnson and strives for human connection within this lonely world.

People Mover – Cane Trash

Brisbane trio People Mover—that’s Lu Sergiacomi (vocals, guitar), Dan Sergiacomi (drums) and Billy McCulloch (bass)—are preparing to release their new album Cane Trash via Little Lunch Records next month, and have unveiled the title track as an introduction. It’s an inherently nostalgic track that draws on memories of the ash which filled the air of hometown Bundaberg during the burn-off of sugarcane before harvest, the bright, upbeat surface belying the melancholic weight at it heart. Which isn’t to say the juxtaposition of joy and sadness is in any way peculiar, for what else is fondness but the persistent presence of those very emotions? “‘Cane Trash’ gives into memories of where you came from and how you used to feel,” as Lu Sergiacomi explains. “It analyses where we go when we need to reset. Is it home, or can it be somewhere that reminds you of it? That memory is an analogy for the album—things are fragile, special and fleeting.”

Shrunken Elvis – K-House

Spencer Cullum, Sean Thompson, and Michael Ruth (AKA Rich Ruth) are all renowned musicians in their own right, be that with their own work—Cullum releasing solo material via Full Time Hobby, Thompson forming bands like Gnarwhal and Promised Land Sound, and Rich Ruth putting out acclaimed albums with Third Man Records—or supporting a wide range of well-known artists in recording and touring. So bringing the three together was always going to be a recipe for success. Under the moniker Shrunken Elvis, they have united to explore their shared passion for experimental music, merging their talents in order to transcend genre and create something new. The project “represents a rare opportunity to create purely for the sake of collaboration and curiosity,” as the album notes put it, the trio drawing on everything from Michael Rother, Alice Coltrane, and Pat Metheny to Can, Ashra and KLF to inform their sound, not to mention inspiration beyond music, be that visual art or the films of Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman. A self-titled album is on the way via Western Vinyl, and you can listen to single ‘K-House’ now. A track which takes something of the nocturnal urgency of eighties cop show theme tunes then expands its horizons with lush psych and cosmic tones.

Stella Donnelly – Baths

Three years after the release of her last full length, Flood, Naarm/Melbourne songwriter Stella Donnelly has returned with a new double A-side single, Baths / Standing Ovation. Both songs are stripped back relative to her previous work (at least until the back half of ‘Standing Ovation’), with a patience and stillness that gives them a sense of meditative clarity. ‘Baths’ in particular stands out, almost acapella as Donnelly’s vocals stand front and centre over barely-there keyboard notes. The music has the effect of incidental ambient noise and this is no accident, as the track was conceived as the sounds of the world seeped in. “I came up with this melody while I was swimming laps at the Brunswick Baths,” Donnelly explains. “The pool filter was making a humming sound on one note which allowed me to sing a melody over the top. “It then continued when I got home and had a shower with the bathroom fan on… I finally sat with a keyboard and held a note and it all just came together.”

Tim Carr – Alone Playing Piano

Though Tim Carr has made a name as part of other projects, be that Perfume Genius, Hand Habits or collaborating on records like Rebecca Schiffman‘s recent LP, Before the Future, he also has a rich solo career too. His debut release might have followed a folk tradition, but Carr’s sound is one in constant evolution, and new full-length Pleaure Drives leans into digital pop and electronic music. Recorded in the Crescenta Valley, the album draws on the LA golden hour in its romance and mystery, Carr intentionally working from a position of celebration rather than melancholy. “Pleasure drove this album to completion,” as he explains, “as it was made from a playful place as opposed to a melancholic state or being smothered by perfectionism.” Latest single ‘Alone Playing Piano’ encapsulates this spirit both in terms of lyrics (“Alone playing piano / getting into it / hitting wrong notes / trying to find the right ones / let it happen when the time comes”) and sound, the track not living up to the apparent austerity of its title but instead offering a shadowy Lynchian waltz.

villagerrr – Ride Or Die w/ Lydia

“Zeroing in on life’s small, ostensibly ordinary moments to find the meaning within.” So we wrote of villagerrr‘s Tear Your Heart Out in a list of our favourite albums of 2024, a record which saw songwriter Mark Scott embrace his Midwestern roots with a country-inflected brand of indie rock. “The result is a decidedly empathetic collection of songs able to zoom close to the smallest details of small town life,” we continued, “be it light through a sunroof, the smell of cut grass or pencil drawings made in an effort to preserve memories.” Having now signed with Winspear, villagerrr is releasing a new deluxe version of the album featuring a handful of previously unreleased bonus tracks, including new single ‘Ride Or Die w/ Lydia’. Featuring feeble little horse‘s Lydia Slocum, the track is characteristically fond and compassionate, sitting in that liminal space between summer and autumn, where the shadows grow long and the colours tend towards a sepia glow.

Watch the video edited by Trevor Hock below:

Tear Your Heart Out [Deluxe Edition] will be released via Winspear on the 10th October and you can pre-order it now.

Weakened Friends – NPC (feat. Buckethead)

Ever feel like life isn’t quite as real as many like to believe? That unfolding events are predestined, not so much by cosmic fate but something more computational? These are the ideas worrying Weakened Friends on new single ‘NPC’, a decidedly existential track featuring guitarist Buckethead inspired by the reality-bending simulation theory. But far from some exercise in idle sci-fi daydreaming, the song is urgent, defiant and cathartic. Fatalistic, but delivered with the kind of full-throated passion that can only exist in those still with the spirit to fight. This tone runs through Feels Like Hell, the Portland, Maine outfit’s new album coming soon on Don Giovanni Records, where every soul-destroying facet of our present moment is used as fuel on the fire. 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.

Maybe I’m just fucked in the head
Here daydreaming of annihilation
Maybe we should just hit reset
It’d be the best thing

Watch the video by SunBronx & Olise Forel below:

Feels Like Hell will be released on the 9th October via Don Giovanni and you can pre-order it now.

Wombo – S.T. Tilted

We’ve covered a number of singles from Wombo‘s new full-length Danger in Fives in recent months, noting how the release sees the Louisville outfit push the envelope rather than resting on their laurels. “I don’t want to be in a band that’s confined to one form of writing,” as vocalist and bassist Sydney Chadwick says. “Where’s the fun and the creativity and the exploration in that? You have to push yourself and try something new.” With the album out now via Fire Talk Records, Wombo have shared new single, ‘S.T. Tilted’ as if to prove this sentiment. “It’s the first song we wrote after the Slab EP that made it on Danger in Fives,” as guitarist Cameron Lowe explains. “We weren’t sure it was going to work, but all the contrasting parts ended up being cool. It’s rare for a Wombo song to be written on guitar first like this one, with some of the bass and drum parts jammed out in the basement afterwards. The wacky guitar part came last.”

Watch Lowe’s video below:

Danger in Fives is out now via Fire Talk and available from the Wombo Bandcamp page.

The post Weekly Listening: August 2025 #2 appeared first on Various Small Flames.

With the album’s release fast approaching, Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats have now shared the album closer as a new single; their own take on My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Lose My Breath’. “Before the first show of our tour together Saya asked if I knew this My Bloody Valentine song and if I would join them and sing it as part of their set,” Krgovich explains. “Of course I was up for it but MBV is a bit of a blindspot for me. She was like “it’s called ‘Lose My Breath’,” and then as soon as the wordless oooh’s happened I was like “oh! That one!!!” I had a cassette copy of Isn’t Anything that I got at a thrift store while in high school and it was in my old Volvo as a teenager. I don’t remember listening to that tape all that much but I remember loving that melody, and I still do.”

The recorded version of the track goes some way to preserving this moment in amber. A snapshot of a group of musicians pitched together for a short window of time, subject to the small moments of chance and happenstance and all the more special for it. This atmosphere is indicative of the spirit of an album made in such a manner. The ephemerality of the moment is essentially the entire point. No overthinking, no ironing out creases or polishing flaws, just leaning into the simple magic of a couple of days and preserving it for the sake of prosperity.

Watch the visualizer created using footage shot at at Guggenheim House in Kobe, Japan below:

Wao will be released on the 29th August via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

The post Shabason, Krgovich, Tenniscoats – Lose My Breath (My Bloody Valentine cover) appeared first on Various Small Flames.

Wilder Maker’s forthcoming album The Streets Like Beds Still Warm is a very different record to 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. As though the band itself was one such figure looking to move and progress and reach for something different. 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 worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.

The trilogy of albums promises to chart an entire night in the city, with The Streets Like Beds Still Warm taking us from dusk to sometime after midnight. And the style makes good on the form. These are songs free from traditional structures but never sprawling. Ambiguous and often hypnotic but governed by linear motion. A path down which we follow the protagonist, watching as he moves through the night and the night moves through him, his own character and state of mind shifting as the hours slide on by. “Film noir detectives always start out looking immaculate, but by the end of the film they have a torn collar, a black eye, their slacks are stained, and they’ve started slapping people around in desperation,” Birnbaum says. “Are they the good guy anymore? I find this fascinating and I love the visual cues reflecting the internal landscape.” 

With the album set for release in September, Wilder Maker have unveiled the two opening tracks as singles. Listen to ‘Strange Meeting with Owls’ and ‘Skewered by the Daystar’ below and take your first few steps into what will be a long night indeed.

The Streets Like Beds Still Warm will be released on the 19th September via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Photo by Keegan Grandbois

The post Wilder Maker – Strange Meeting with Owls / Skewered by the Daystar appeared first on Various Small Flames.