Deja Vu can be quite the restless feeling. When moments of wracking the brain for memories becomes a dialogue; longing for answers and building mistrust in any bit of reason as to why this feeling is so intense. But what herbal tea does on this debut album Hear as the Mirror Echoes is build upon this space; one that feels achingly familiar, but you can’t seem to pin down why. herbal tea is the project of British artist Helena Walker, who has spent the last several years crafting songs in solitude and playing with artists such as Gia Margaret and Advance Base on their UK tours. Now she shares her long-awaited debut album via Orindal Records and Gold Day. Recorded entirely DIY with her long-time collaborator and childhood friend Henry C. Sharpe, the two brought these songs to life out of various rented living rooms and bedrooms, filling each corner of the space with their intuitive folk-laden dream pop.
Like watching a line of geese cross the road, the stories that Walker entrusts in us take time, but there is comfort in the practice. One by one, each song disrupts the bustle of the outside world and marks her path through these intimate landscapes. The opening track “seventeen” toys with time as a coping tool, as Walker sings, “I’m inventing life again at seventeen / Dancing in a drawing room / like in a dream”, opening up to the struggles of trauma through shifting layers of cinematic synths and cutting distortion. This sentiment is carried through on tracks like “Grounded” and “Kitchen Floor (4A.M.)” as they become sobering moments of stillness, balancing how to effectively ground yourself while also longing for someone else to rely on in times when you can’t rely on yourself. “I don’t know what I’m worth, but I want someone like an old friend,” Walker sings on the latter track, allowing the melodies to wash over with such gentle motion.
Although these songs feel heavy, what Walker creates is a place to lean into this undeniable familiarity with both validity and inquiry; a piece of work that is just as much about discovery as it is about understanding why these feelings are here in the first place. “Submarine” creates depth amongst the many voicings that Walker and Sharpe explore, threatening to strain each choice as she becomes buried by intense longing. The standout track “Garden” revels in the delicate harmonies that seem to flow whichever way the breeze blows. Soon Walker’s singular voice becomes the benchmark for retainment and release. Growing out from planted guitars and light piano chords, the dream stops in its tracks as Walker sings, “I was born in a garden, when I liked being me, before the burden of my body.” The song speaks to the difference between growing wild and getting clipped from the stem to fit into a handpicked vase, but herbal tea refuses to be restricted as the instrumentation blooms in full color and variety.
Hear as the Mirror Echoes becomes a space in which themes of dissociation, longing and emotional anxiety are written about with such care. Where stories are rooted by intuitive soundscapes and ethereal vocal performances that each become empathetic to the other’s expressional deliverance. It’s easy to get lost in the malaise of self-doubt, but herbal tea gives voice to thought and comfort to dissonance. It’s a collection that moves at its own pace, and to its credit, the album’s greatest strengths come from those little individual blossoms of patient voicings and unconventional instrumentals that make this record feel so deeply human.
You can listen to Hear as the Mirror Echoes anywhere you find your music as well as order cassette and vinyl put together by Orindal Records and Gold Day.
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Providence / Brooklyn-based band Dogs on Shady Lane.
Today, I found out I can fit three listens of Dogs on Shady Lane’s latest EP into my commute from Brooklyn to Midtown. It was not a calculated experiment, rather a product of the EP’s cunning structure and how its wistful textures pair so perfectly against a rainy New York morning. I was lost in it from the second I twisted the lock on my apartment door to the broody intro chords of “Knife (Lady)”, until the inflamed final moments of “Basement” accompanied my departure from frenzied train stop to umbrella-clad Manhattan streets. Fronted by Tori Hall, who started the project in 2018, Dogs on Shady Lane is a Providence / Brooklyn based four piece that now includes Evan Weinstein (guitar/synth/vocals), Calder Mansfield (bass/vocals), and Grace Gross (drums). It is impressive how deep cut their 2024 release, appropriately titled The Knife, manages to cut within a timeline just shy of 14 minutes (or 42 minutes depending on your self-control). As withering introspections surrounding a brittle heart tread in fuzzy alt-folk sea, Hall’s honeyed vocals are at times complemented by the twinkly instrumentals they coincide with and at times engulfed by fervent and frothy riffs. It is a stunning and cathartic listen, one certainly representative of the dynamic quality of Dogs on Shady Lane’s discography, the captivating nature of their live sets, and surely any future projects they may have in store.
As the dog days of summer have come and gone, the newly formed Bloomington-based band Just Penelope is here to stay as they share their debut single “June, July”. Just Penelope, consisting of University of Indiana classmates Ella Curiel (vocals/guitar), Ethan Cantrell (drums/vocals) and Drew Goforth (bass), recently signed to Angel Tapes, the Chicago-based imprint of Fire Talk Records. Upon the release of their new single, Just Penelope lay it all out within their type of midwestern exceptionalism, where the blend of dynamic noise and earnest storytelling find revelries in the caricatures that live and foster life in the middle country.
Singing the praises of the power pop connoisseurs and starry-eyed romantics alike, Just Penelope enters rattled, but not deterred, as Curiel breaks ahead, singing “June, July / My shoes untied”, and leading the calloused guitars and clotted percussive motion on a mission. Written about a skateboarding injury following a parental spat, the song levels that teenage potency, where emotions feel too big to put into words and heavy distortion and scrapped knees both hold a place of fondness for rebellion and self-determination. As the song builds, embracing the heavy undertones and the melodic strains, the break in the song’s dynamic pacing showcases the intentionality behind the gives and takes of our day-to-day actions, throwing caution to the wind as we relish in that invincibility we feel in the moment.
Watch the music video for “June, July” directed and edited by Keegan Priest.
You can listen to “June, July” out everywhere you find your music. Keep an eye out for more to come from Just Penelope.
Written by Shea Roney | Photo Courtesy of Just Penelope
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by New York based project My Wonderful Boyfriend.
Today, My Wonderful Boyfriend shared new single, “I’m Your Man”. Before listening, I speculated it might be some sort of redemption for the penultimate track on An Evening With…, the EP that the Brooklyn based four piece shared earlier this year. That track – titled “Here Comes Your Man”, is a yearning drenched unraveling that pulls from the perspective of, well, not being someone’s man. My Wonderful Boyfriend has a knack for attaining sincerity through those charmingly arbitrary slacker-rock song structures, generating emotional friction through cavorting melodies and raw vocals prone to bouts of excessive repetition. This spills into “I’m Your Man”, leaving the contents of the track a lot less absolute than the title may suggest.
Despite its lyrical ambivalence and housed introspections of “I’m shaky because I’m not quite sure I’m your man”, the track in itself is far from timid. “I’m Your Man” starts on a punchy, over-caffeinated note and still manages an impressive build up over its five minute life span. It’s cushioned with charged da-da-da-da‘s and a stint of hallelujah’s, of which ultimately lead to MWB cramming twenty-and-some-change declarations of “i’m your man” within the track’s final thirty seconds. Whether “I’m Your Man” is a redemption or a continuation or ultimately entirely unrelated to the pining found on their January release is not something I can confidently conclude. What I can tell you, and with confidence, is that it is a damn good song. However, if my opinion is not enough for you to give it a listen (fair enough), then the track’s inspiration playlist – which jumps from Jane Remover to Playboi Carti to Pulp to Wilco – should do the trick.
About the playlist, My Wonderful Boyfriend shared;
“We started out trying to build a playlist of direct influences on “I’m Your Man,” but I guess had too much fun and went with more general influences and songs that make us excited to play, write, and listen to music.”
“I’ve tried playing football, soccer, baseball, and tennis. I even tried trap shooting for a little bit,” Ryan Walchonski lists out. “But I could never find anything that I was really good at. I think through my experience with Feeble Little Horse, I was like, ‘okay, maybe music is something that I am good at.’ That was pretty empowering to feel.”
Walchonski is the founder of the band Aunt Katrina, first a solo project now a full band based in Baltimore, who recently shared their debut LP titled This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me. After many personal changes, moving from D.C. to Baltimore and parting ways with his previous band, Feeble Little Horse, Walchonski began to look inward, redefining his placement in his own practice and in the communities that he both came up in and inhabits now. Jumping right into the project, Aunt Katrina released an EP titled Hot back in 2023 via Crafted Sounds. Embedded into the oddities of surrounding noise, Walchonski’s style of glitchy electro-pop and lo-fi folk fixings linked arms to combat the very mundane that we so badly want to resist. Seven songs in, Hot was a taste test into Walchonski’s fluency in songwriting, leaning heavily into sound production and the personal victory of releasing something entirely of his own.
But This Heat became a fixation to Walchonski as he worked to push the bounds of his own songwriting abilities, while continuing to explore the avenues of what he does best. At its core, the album sits amongst pop-song antiques, relishing in the delicate, yet damaged instrumental layers that are as unpredictable as they are inherent to the grace offered amongst the worn in melodies and personal stories that they are written from. But what cuts through on this album is a newfound presence that Walchonski now leads with. There are moments that brush past bits of our own internal dialogues – anxieties, doubts and memories that each take their turns in the queue. They don’t represent moments that just pass by, but rather the stories that he needed to tell and the healing that he needed to feel that soon became synonymous with a musical progression and identity built on embracing personal trial and error.
We recently got to ask Walchonski about the new record, self-releasing and finding his voice as a songwriter.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
With your debut LP now out, how is it sitting with you? How are you feeling?
Feels good. The EP was kind of a trial, I would say. I really wanted to have this album out so I could have things that I feel like were more in line with what I wanted our music to sound like. Mostly relief, I would say. It’s been a long time coming, releasing an album, especially when you’re just kind of doing it yourself. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.
You did decide to go the self releasing route. What was that like for you? Does that practice reflect the way you want to view this project that you have?
I can be wary of the music industry and record labels. I’ve worked with a lot of good labels in the past, but I think I don’t like answering to other people. I think that a big part of it was just that I don’t want anyone to tell me or my band that we have to play shows, or that we’re not playing enough or do something that I don’t really want to do. I don’t know what the future will hold, because self-releasing an album can also be expensive. So maybe I’ll need someone else to help pay for it in the future. But, at least for this one, I wanted it to just be uncompromising. I didn’t want anyone else to really have a say in what we are doing and how I was releasing it.
This album has been a few years coming for you. You’ve since moved from DC to Baltimore and went through a lot of personal and creative shifts. Where did these songs fall in that timeline? How did this shift impact the way that you wanted to continue this project as you further defined it as this entity that is yours?
I would say these songs were finished about this time last year. It was really just about trying to stand on my own two feet, I guess. Prove to myself that I can write songs. I feel like every subsequent song I write feels like it is the last one, like, that was just a fluke. But I think Aunt Katrina, to me, is a continuous form of proving to myself that I am capable and that I can write songs.
It does feel like a lot of playing with your own expectations. So as you try to progress yourself as a defined songwriter, what sort of things were you trusting that you were coming out of this process that made you feel like a songwriter?
It’s tough, because I think I’ve always been pushing myself to try to be a songwriter. First and foremost, I started music by playing guitar, but I think where I really wanted to find myself was with songwriting. It’s a matter of trusting the process, as corny as that saying has become. I love writing music. I do it all the time. The trust is that it’s the only thing I’ve ever done in my life that makes me feel good. That’s hyperbolic, but as far as hobbies or jobs go, I feel like I’ve tried everything. I’ve tried sports. I’ve tried other artistic endeavors. Music is the only thing that I come back to that gets me up in the morning. It’s something I’m excited to do which I think can be really tough to find as a human.
So as you start to find your footing, proving to yourself that you are a songwriter, how did you rein in the experimentation that the first EP represented into what you would wanted this album to be?
The EP was kind of my experiment with writing songs outside of the context of Feeble Little Horse, but with the skills and tools that I had developed being a part of that band. It was really like, ‘Okay, I see that I can write songs collaboratively with this band. I want to explore that personally with myself. Let’s see if I can write 5 or 6 songs that are just me and see if I could do that period and then take those songs and turn it into a band.’ Because what I missed was playing in a local band. I think it’s a really rewarding experience. Everyone wants to get to the next level, but being in a local band is cool. You can hang out with your friends for like four hours on a Tuesday night and drink beer, play a show, make no money, and then go home. And you’re like, ‘that was the best time that I’ve ever had’.
So, with the album, I had this initial proof of concept with the EP. Those songs are cool. But I really want to write the best songs that I can and continue to apply the skills that I’m learning and grow my strengths as a songwriter. This album, to me, is much more personal than the EP. I wanted to write a full-length album. I wanted to write better songs. I think there’s a bit of a less reliance on digital flourishes. The EP also came around the time when I was really experimenting in Ableton. It felt almost like playing another instrument. Learning how to use the software that you record is not necessarily conducive to writing good songs, though it’s just like an instrument that you can apply to your sound.
Because this was a strikingly personal record for you, a lot of these songs get lost in all this disillusionment from all these personal shifts. As you were starting to get your footing as a songwriter, do you think that allowed you to get more personal in the stories you told? Do you feel like there was more of a foundation that would back you up?
I think I felt more empowered to think, ‘how can I write a song that really expresses how I feel?’ I already did the first thing; I put something out. That’s great. But how can I write an album that really feels personal to me? I think I felt empowered to write about more personal, oftentimes negative feelings that I was having, because I felt more confident in myself as a songwriter.
Did it become an escape from this disillusionment that you were feeling, or more of a way to sit in it and grant yourself the time to understand these feelings?
I’ve always leaned into songs that I feel can put words or sounds to the way that I’m feeling. I latch on to very specific lines in songs that I have stuck in my head. I wasn’t writing it to be like, ‘Oh, man, I feel bad. I have these negative emotions. Let me try to write a song about it.’ I can talk about when I feel happy or excited about something, but it’s harder to talk about something that I’m struggling with. And the songs were, in a way, more like diary entries than a purposeful, ‘I’m going to write a song about what it feels like to me to have anxiety and suffer with that’. It was more so, ‘I feel like shit. I’m going to write a song. And somewhere within the subconscious of my lyric writing process I’ll express these negative emotions without necessarily trying to do it’.
These songs do play with a lot of sonic tensions and inherited emotions. What is it about that blend of feelings and styles that felt right in this writing process?
It definitely does. I think part of it is that I write the music in ways that I like music to sound. So usually, that’s stuff that is catchy or rhythmically interesting, or just fun to listen to for your ears. And then the lyrics, it’s almost like I can’t help myself in writing – I don’t know, it’s almost like some emo music where the instrumentation is not necessarily depressing but the lyrics are. I wasn’t inspired by emo, but I think there’s some through lines.
That point of making music that sounds fun, I feel like that really falls into the way that you’ve approach cherishing the community around you, because it’s fun. Where do you remind yourself that this is supposed to be fun, especially when you feel like shitor are doubting yourself?
Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of what life is. We’re kind of cycling between feeling like shit, and also like having fun, right? That’s also what’s so beautiful about music to me. It can be so fun, but it can also be so personal and challenging. That’s why I like being in a band. That’s why I like making music. It’s something that is so personally fulfilling to me, it’s just a reflection on life and how that makes us feel.
You can listen to This Heat Is Slowly Killing Me out everywhere now as well as order a vinyl or CD made with the help of Crafted Sounds.
Written by Shea Roney | Featured Photo by Julia Hernandez
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by Brooklyn-based band Ringing.
If you are fond of distortion and reside in New York, chances are you have caught a Ringing set. The Brooklyn based four-piece has a knack for bathing introspective lyricism and spiraling melodies in rich sludgy atmospheres — a feat found in their live shows as well as their 2023 EP, Is It Light Where You Are?
Listen to Ringing’s playlist here!
You can check out Ringing on Bandcamp below!
Written by Manon Bushong | Featured Photo by Avery Davis
The first time we featured Lefty Parker in the Ugly Hug, it was for his visual art. He shared a few posters in a show flyer feature of our Newsletter, done in his medium of choice – Etch a Sketch. Its a creative tool that certainly garners novelty points, and anyone who has dabbled in one of those red boxes in their lifetime can attest to the fact that creating anything legible on there is an impressive feat in itself. But what Lefty is able to do on Etch A Sketch, and his ability to hone so much life through mere two dimensional scratches, is breathtaking. In a world pulverized by stimulation, it can often feel the price tag to attention is a never-ending slew of hollow maximalism. It’s exhausting, which is why I think today more than ever, we crave art that subverts excess. Art that is grounded in imperfection and art that takes a step back. I think that is what makes the “Etches” Lefty does so moving; the depth of sensitivity found in a portrait or animal or shower head juxtaposed against the perceived limits and simplicity of the medium. I would urge you to check them out if you have not yet.
This post is about Lefty’s music, but I choose to lead with that context because I like the parallels between his crafts. Today, Lefty announced his forthcoming record, Ark, sharing lead single, “Illusions”. It’s a story of staggering heartache through a deeply human lens; of asking the sky for answers, of the achey impacts of a memory saturated town, of the inescapable wear and tear that comes with being alive. Featuring Buck Meek, “Illusions” leaves a stubborn mark in the same way that Lefty’s Etch A Sketch pictures do – as tender vignettes unravel on a familiar folk canvas, the track is profound and touching without any sort of gimmicks. It rewards intentionality; with each listen the soft woodwinds and warm twangy melodies grow in beauty while the harmonized somber vignettes cut deeper. By rooting itself in an earnest simplicity, “Illusions” captures yearning in its most honest and delicate form. It’s refreshing and complex, and a lovely sliver of the kind of calloused storytelling we can expect from Ark.
Ark will be out October 24th. You can listen to “Illusions” now.
Carving out its own space in this large, unforgiving world, the self-titled debut EP by plu became a notable piece of collaboration and artistic growth for LA-based artist Pluto Bell. As a multi-skilled artist and musician, spending a decade within the underground experimental scenes of LA, Bell worked to develop their own artistic voice through various collaborative projects and exploring alternative ways to songwriting that has since helped bring plu to this dynamic life it now leads. Released a few months ago via Anxiety Blanket Records, plu finds Bell leading a band for the first time, pushing the bounds of their dizzying compositions and the shape of the project as a whole.
plu breaks like a fever as these songs become a swell of internal affairs, functioning as a team of mysterious little pieces that have taken matters into their own hands. The EP feels like a physical reaction, where songs like “Laziness Studio” and “Juggling” are locked in amongst the constant motion brought out by loose time signatures and deep and incredibly tight instrumental calisthenics. But what plu does so naturally in this strange little world that they have made is redefine control; what it is and how to wield it in practice when it comes to their creativity. Where intuition blends with cause and effect as a means to create something with levels of unexpected beauty. Where sounds clash and melodies wander off, but with a newfound trust that they will find their way back. Bell relishes in this back-pocket absurdity in a way that feels both incredibly vulnerable and enticing for the new project, breaking away from formulation and expectations, and embracing what matters most when it comes to releasing music as a creative motive.
We recently got to ask Bell a few questions about the debut EP, repurposing laziness and finding inspiration in unexpected places.
Although plu is your debut EP, you have been piecing it together for a few years now. What was the timeline that led to this release, and when did it feel like it was ready to see through to the end?
plu came together gradually and organically. I’ve been collaborating on and off with the players since 2015, when we all first met at CalArts. Back then, my focus was more on experimental and compositional work, but post-school I started leaning more into songwriting and figuring out what my voice sounded like in that context.
Things quieted down after the pandemic. I went through a stretch of creative uncertainty—like I didn’t quite know what I wanted to make, or even how I wanted to exist musically. But in that time, I kept tinkering with demos, and eventually, a new sonic shape started to form—something that felt more aligned with where I wanted to head.
I’d say plu is the result of finding my creative self again, but in a new form. It’s a fresh face, in a way, but also part of an ongoing evolution that stretches back to the beginning. This music is also deeply tied to the musicians I’m working with—people I trust and feel deeply comfortable around. A big reason this band works is because of the relationships we have with one another. As someone who’s pretty introverted and protective of my creative space, it feels most natural to work with people who are familiar with me in both intimate and creative ways. These are friends I feel safe being vulnerable with, which is essential for this kind of collaborative work—at least for me. It’s a different kind of openness than composing, which can feel more solitary and controlled.
Eventually, I realized I had a handful of demos that felt cohesive within this new sound world. That’s when I brought this group together. We kept things super low-pressure—no shows, no big goals—just rehearsing together and slowly fleshing things out. Over time, we started wanting to share what we had. We began playing shows with what was basically an eight-minute set, and eventually a few more songs emerged. That’s when the EP started to take shape—something we wanted to share in a more materially distributable way.
You stated that a lot of your inspiration is non-musical, taking specs of daily life and the things you read as a means to your creativity. As it comes to songwriting and crafting these auditory experiences, how do you take these non-musical inspirations and create a song from them?
For me, this mostly plays out in the lyrics. Writing lyrics doesn’t come naturally, but when I’m reading—especially certain kinds of theory or poetic prose—something clicks. These texts don’t offer clarity in a straightforward way; instead, they make language feel strange, opaque, even slightly off-kilter. I’m really drawn to that.
I’ve always felt a little disoriented by language. I often forget common words or meanings, and I struggle to express myself clearly, especially in real-time conversation. That kind of disconnect has shaped the way I approach working with language—words feel less like precise tools and more like slippery objects. Reading theory allows me to interact with language in that object-like way. It becomes about turning words around in my head, feeling their texture and shape, seeing what angles they reveal. That’s usually what spurs lyrical ideas for me—not in a narrative sense, but through this tactile engagement with fragmented thought and abstract feeling. What that feeling is can shapeshift or wriggle out of grasp, and that ambiguity is part of the point.
When it comes to daily life, if I’m in a good practice, I’ll jot things down—little observations, overheard phrases, moments of feeling, usually in ways that are still a bit abstracted or poetic. It’s less about journaling and more about tuning into textures of experience.
Sometimes my lyrics end up resembling an aggregate of readymade bites—language I’ve borrowed, recycled, or recontextualized. Other times they’re more like personal etchings. But more often, it’s a mixture of the two. One spurs the other, and together they create this layered mesh of thought, tone, and intuition.
I am really drawn to this idea of redefining laziness as a positive. How has the concept of “Laziness” brought out these songs, and what was the process of repurposing that word like for you and your creativity?
Redefining laziness is definitely an ongoing practice for me, and the track—Laziness Studies—was partly about reckoning with my inner critic and trying to reframe how I think about slowness, stillness, or the lulls that happen in the creative process.
I’m someone who often has to remind myself that it’s okay not to be constantly producing. It’s easy to fall into comparison—looking at how other people seem to work, or how much they’re putting out—and feel like I’m behind. But I’ve come to realize that everyone’s energy, pace, and needs are different. And honestly, doing something entirely unrelated, or taking a break altogether, can be just as generative as the work itself.
If “laziness” had any broader role in the album, it might be in the way I let myself take my time. This project wasn’t rushed. I had to slowly find my footing again musically, and I wanted to let that process unfold without pressure. That same philosophy extended into how we formed as a band too—we didn’t set any immediate goals or try to force performances. We just rehearsed, got to know the material, and let it develop at its own pace. So in that way, I guess “laziness”—or really just slowness—was part of how this all came to be. Not as a flaw, but as a form of care.
What sort of things did you see come out of these songs as you began to move from the demos to these rather complex pieces? What were your intentions as you began the process and did they change as these songs were given life?
I’m not sure I go into songs with many firm intentions. It’s more about following my intuition, letting something unfold, and then being fairly decisive in the editing process. But once I brought the songs to the band, they began to grow in ways I couldn’t have predicted—and that’s actually a big part of what I wanted and hoped for with this group.
Collaborating meant letting three other people—Jack Doubt, Leah Levinson, and Jesse Quebman-Turley—bring in their own musical idiosyncrasies, voice ideas, and, at times, push me in directions I wouldn’t have gone on my own. The initial seed of each song is still there, but the way things crystallized was shaped by each of us.
Some of the early demos were so idiosyncratic—especially in terms of timing and structure—that we had to figure out how to translate them into something we could actually play in sync, while still maintaining the fluidity that made them work in the first place. Shadow Mythic is a good example of that. The original demo wasn’t really built with a band in mind, so recreating it as-is wasn’t possible within our setup. Instead, it became about reshaping the song into something more collective—finding a new version that still held the spirit of the original. Once I knew I was working with everyone, I began writing more with them in mind, which also started to shape how the songs evolved.
I can be pretty particular, which goes back to what I mentioned earlier about the importance of working with people I already feel safe around—people I can communicate with openly, who understand me. But it’s just as important that they challenge me too. I think that tension—the balance of trust and pushback—is what really gives these songs their shape. Even the ideas that didn’t make it into the final versions helped move the process forward.
The songs sound and feel the way they do because of what each member brings: their unique sensibilities, their relationship to their instrument, and their broader musical instincts. They each expanded the scope of what the songs could be—and pushed me to try structural things, for example, that I might not have thought to, or dared to, on my own.
You can listen to plu out anywhere you find your music. You can also order a cassette tape of the EP via Anxiety Blanket Records.
Written by Shea Roney | Photo Courtesy of Anxiety Blanket Records
Every Wednesday, the ugly hug shares a playlist personally curated by an artist/band that we have been enjoying. This week we have a collection of songs put together by LA-based artist Izzy Hagerup of the project Prewn.
Following the release of 2023’s debut LP Through The Window, Hagerup has just announced her follow up album titled System, out October 3rd via Exploding in Sound. The music that comes from Prewn is as deliberately harsh as it is instinctively beautiful. Through The Window bound together lush textures and open spaces by building trusting relationships with dissident sound structures and absorbent lyricism. Prewn’s pulse continues to pump with the release of “System”, the first single off the upcoming album and accompanied by a music video directed by Sophie Feuer.
“System” opens like a cold sweat, where thick, briny strings dribble down like beads; dribble farther down your face than you would often allow before wiping away. It’s a moment that feels stuck in time, one that deliberates between peace of mind and a piece of mind that can’t quite fall into place. As the strings begin to take shape, offering a counterbalance to Hagerup’s melodic fortitude, you want to say that it sweeps you up into a dream-like state, but this is real life, and she knows that. The song soon breaks off as Hagerup belts, “just give your life away”, a chorus of searing words that give voice to the internal conflicts between mental struggles and the buttoned-up expectations that are often placed on us. It’s a stunning track that builds upon frustration with such intent as Hagerup’s singular voice becomes the benchmark for retainment and release, slowly bringing us back to that same moment of stillness from which we began.
About the playlist, Hagerup shared;
“Some songs that I’ve come back to again and again over the years”
Listen to the playlist here;
Listen to System here!
System is set to be released October 3rd via Exploding In Sound. You can pre-order the album now as well as on vinyl.
I have a tendency to fall into anecdotal rambling when I try to write about a project I find especially moving. This achilles heal is most inflamed when a song makes me cry – which does not happen super often – but when it does, I have to fight the urge to cite my own tears. It’s usually a desperate attempt to articulate the gravity of a track without turning to some dry technical dissection, but it doesn’t matter. No one gives a shit about the time I cried at my roommate’s roller blading competition, seated in a patch of grass above the park with Shallowater’s There is a Well in my ratty noise-cancelling headphones. So I will not tell you about it.
What I will say is that Houston based Shallowater is not doing anything new. At least not in a way I can cite on paper. Their soundscapes are familiar and rather organic, and I could write a laundry list of band comparisons ranging from emo and posthardcore to alt-country and slowcore, and they would all be valid. I suppose that is the real root of this apprehensive music journalism crisis I have so generously decided to include in this single review – the chasm between the abstractly unprecedented feel of a band and a reality that they are not technically doing anything unheard of. But perhaps that is the foundation for the most touching projects; an ability to pull from motifs seen countless times before and churn it into something that stops you in your tracks.
Today, Shallowater shared “Sadie”, the second single off their forthcoming record, God is Going to Give You a Million Dollars. The track starts on a gentle note, finding its footing in drawn out enunciations and a cautious rhythm section. As vocals grow in urgency, the soundscapes inflate into an eventual riff –lathered with mucky distortion, indulgent percussion, and a suffocating amount of poignancy. In the span of seven and a half minutes, Shallowater pursues this sort of escalation more than once, leaving you unsure of which buildup is the buildup. Perhaps the answer is neither? Perhaps the mud-slides of twangy sludge are less a destination than they are a means of amplifying slivers of delicacy and desperation between them. In the case of “Sadie”, soft vocals tend to cut deepest when they follow moments of sweeping cacophony. It’s enough to subdue even the sturdiest of poker faces.
You can listen to “Sadie” everywhere now, and pre-order God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars on Bandcamp.
the ugly hug 