Damon Albarn stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night (November 12), performing ‘Darkness to Light’ from his new album The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows. Watch it below.
The performance coincided with the release date of the album, which follows Albarn’s 2014 solo record Everyday Robots. It was previewed with the singles ‘The Tower of Montevideo’, ‘Polaris’, ‘Particles’, ‘Royal Morning Blue’, and the title track.
Following its premiere earlier on Friday (November 12) at Manhattan’s AMC 13 Lincoln Square cinema, Taylor Swift has shared the short film accompanying ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)’, which appears on the re-recorded version of Red. Swift wrote and directed the short film, which stars Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien and was shot on 35 mm film by cinematographer Rina Yang. Watch it below.
Appearing on last night’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Swift explained that she wrote the 10-minute version of ‘All Too Well’ during rehearsals for her Speak Now tour. “I showed up for rehearsals, and I was really upset and sad, and everybody could tell,” she said. “It was really not fun to be around me that day. And so I started playing guitar and just kind of playing the same four chords over and over again, and the band sort of joined in, and I started ad-libbing what I was going through and what I was feeling, and it went on. The song kept building and building and building in intensity, and the song just went on for about, you know, 10 to 15 minutes of us doing this.”
Speaking about the short film in an interview with Seth Meyers, Swift said, “I like working with friends or people who I think would be excited about working with me. I’ve never made a short film before. I needed to reach out to people who would maybe believe that I was capable with it. I’m just blown away by what [Sink and O’Brien] did – they went out and left it all on the field.”
She also told Fallon of working with Sink and O’Brien, “There is one very tense scene between the two of them. They were so electric and improv-ing a lot of what they were doing that we just couldn’t take the camera off them, we couldn’t cut, we couldn’t edit. So there’s a very long one-take one-camera shot that lasts for a very long time, and when you’re watching it you don’t note that you don’t realize that because they are so magnetic.”
Red (Taylor’s Version) arrived on Friday, marking Swift’s second re-recorded album following April’s Fearless (Taylor’s Version). The 30-track project includes nine previously unreleased ‘From the Vault’ tracks as well as collaborations with Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Stapleton, and Ed Sheeran.
Swift will be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live this week on Saturday, November 13, alongside guest host Jonathan Majors.
Charli XCX has shared a new music video for ‘New Shapes’, her recent collaboration with Christine and the Queens and Caroline Polachek. The clip was directed by Imogene Strauss, Luke Orlando, and Terrence O’Connor and takes place on the set of Charli XCX’s talk show TV Heaven, which “will only be available to stream in full once you cross over to the afterlife,” according to a press release. Check it out below.
‘New Shapes’ is the second single from Charli XCX’s upcoming album CRASH, which is set to arrive on March 18, 2022. The pop singer previously shared the video for ‘Good Ones’.
Britney Spears has been freed from the conservatorship that has controlled her life for more than 13 years. As The New York Times reports, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Brenda Penny said in a Friday hearing that the conservatorship should be terminated effective today (November 12).
“The court finds and determines that the conservatorship of the person and the estate of Britney Jean Spears is no longer required,” Judge Penny reportedly said.
Spears was placed in a conservatorship in 2008 after a series of public meltdowns that were heavily covered by the tabloids, taking away her rights to make basic decisions about her finances, career, and personal affairs. The controversial legal arrangement was overseen by her father James “Jamie” Spears, who was formally suspended in September and replaced with California accountant John Zabel as the temporary conservator of Spears’ finances.
Spears has fought for years to put an end to her conservatorship, reporting from The New York Times and New Yorker has since revealed. But it wasn’t until her explosive testimony earlier this year and two documentaries about the case that Spears’ struggles with the conservatorship were brought further into the public eye. “I’ve been in shock. I am traumatized,” Spears told the judge on June 23. “I just want my life back.”
M.I.A. has shared a new song, ‘Babylon’, alongside an accompanying music video. The release coincides with the auction of her 2010 mixtape Vicki Leekx as a non-fungible token (NFT). All funds collected from the auction will be directed to couragefound.org. ‘Babylon’, which was written by M.I.A. and produced by M.I.A., Troy Baker, and Switch, is also available as an NFT. You can listen to it in full at ohmni.com and check out a preview below.
Back in April, M.I.A. launched an NFT art exhibit. Her last studio LP was 2016’s AIM.
When Tasha made her debut album, 2018’s Alone at Last, she had only been writing songs for a couple of years. Though she was still figuring out the kind of songwriter she wanted to be, the Chicago-based musician’s wondrously gentle meditations on the self brimmed with confidence and a rare kind of intimacy, both qualities she has retained and cultivated on her newly released sophomore full-length, Tell Me What You Miss the Most. This time, however, she pays closer attention to the language of each song and its place in the context of the album, making for a listening experience that is not only warm and inviting but also richly rewarding. She brings in a full band and explores new territory on songs like the invigorating ‘Perfect Wife’, showcasing a musical growth that mirrors the personal journey the album relays, swaying from a wistful loneliness born from heartbreak to a peaceful, dizzying kind. One through-line between the two albums is the presence of “bed songs”, which bookend Tell Me What You Miss the Most and represent the symbolic resonance the object holds for Tasha. Take the time to check in with yourself in those quiet moments before the start and end of each day, she seems to say, and see where dreams take you.
We caught up with Tasha for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about her songwriting journey, her new album Tell Me What You Miss the Most, and more.
This new album has been like a warm companion to me now that the weather is getting colder. I feel like it’s the perfect time for it to come out. Could you start by telling me what your relationship with the seasons is like? Are you consciously aware of how they affect you mentally or creatively?
I’m coming to realize that I think the seasons do really affect me or change the way I move through the world, and I think the way that I am creative. Because I’m not really someone who’s always writing or always recording, it’s just not the way that I operate; I never know when it will happen. But I think that I found colder months to be a little bit more inspiring to me. And I’m not totally sure why that is, but all of the songs on the record were written between October and February, except for one.
Which one?
‘Burton Island’ was written later in the year. It was written in September, in the middle of us recording.
It’s still not in the summer then.
Yeah, I don’t think the summer is inspiring. [laughs] I think in my life, the way that I move through the world, it can be inspiring, but when it comes to writing, I rarely feel the urge to sit and write in the summer. And then something about when it starts to get cold – I think it maybe really brings me inside myself. I was nervous for whatever reason about the album coming out this late in the year, but I think it’s becoming clear that maybe it’s the perfect time for it to come out.
How does it make you feel more connected to yourself?
Well, if I think about specific moments when the songs came to life, for many of them, it was like at night, sitting alone in my room with the radiators kicking. And I think maybe colder months bring about a solitude, because when it’s warm you’re hanging out and you’re busy, and the winter really gives me an excuse to stay in. One thing that was different about this record, too, is I went on a little writing retreat in January 2020 because I specifically wanted to go somewhere and write some songs. I was in this house in this little studio in Michigan, just surrounded by snow, and I was going in there five days in a row to write and play guitar. And I’ve never done that before, but that was incredibly inspiring. Again, I think it’s something about the retreat that happens when it’s cold, and inside of that retreat, I don’t have anything else but myself.
Before we talk more about the album, since we’re on the subject of inspiration, I was wondering what it was that originally inspired you to start playing music and writing in general.
I’ve always been really interested in writing since I was a child. I would write stories for little writing competitions when I was in elementary school and middle school, and I loved doing that. And then in high school, I wrote a lot of poetry and I really loved to sing, but for whatever reason, I never considered myself a songwriter when I was younger. It didn’t come so naturally to me. And then through college, too, I was playing guitar and singing a little bit, but mostly, like, picking up a guitar in someone’s dorm but not really spending any time with it. It was after college around 2015 and 2016, I really don’t know what it was, but I think there was something that made me decide that I wanted to try writing songs.
My community at the time of musicians and the way that my life was, I was listening to a lot of like neo-soul and R&B and that world of music. And I had this friend who sent me some beats and I just wrote kind of silly little songs to these, like, lofi beats. [laughs] I feel very shy and kind of embarrassed about it now, but it was my truth at the moment. And then it was around 2016 when I started playing guitar more, and I think it kind of changed my life as far as the way that it made me want to write songs. I started teaching myself more songs on guitar, like covers I loved, and me being someone who could play guitar and sing and write songs, it became more of a reality as I started to just do it more and realize it was possible.
Do you mind sharing some memories of you enjoying music at an early age?
I’ve actually been thinking a lot about the music I used to listen to when I was young. When I was like 10, 11, 12, before it became, like, something I did to be cool, which was kind of how I related to music in high school. [laughs] But I was listening to the Dixie Chicks and Shania Twain and Sheryl Crow, and I was thinking, I was listening to all of these really amazing women musicians and women songwriters and guitar players. And I think that while I maybe didn’t realize it at the time, I’d like to think that maybe it had a really strong influence on me, looking up to these very badass, beautiful, talented women. I loved their music so much, and I can recall birthdays and Christmases when I would ask for CDs of theirs and then just play them loud on a loop on my CD player in my room. And I used to call my mom and my brothers in to watch me, like, perform, which was just me singing along to the song. I would just press play and sing along. [laughs] Maybe it has something to do with where I am.
Is that something that you feel nostalgic about or that you find yourself missing?
It is. I feel nostalgic about it, and I also think about it in a way to remind myself that the thing that I’m doing now really is a dream come true. It sounds a little bit corny, but when I play on stage, it feels like that – it feels kind of indulgent in a way, but it feels so good to sing in front of people. And for it to be song that I made, it feels like such a treat. It’s my favourite thing. It brings me that same giddy feeling, of like: I am so excited to share this thing that I worked on and I really hope people like it. Being in that moment, that sense of power, I think is a similar kind of feeling.
It feels like there’s this arc that Tell Me What You Miss the Most goes through – it comes together more like a story than little vignettes. I was wondering if that’s something you were conscious about in terms of conceptualizing the album while keeping it honest to your experience.
I love that you asked that, because honestly, it wasn’t until the album was almost finished that I found all of these connections between the songs that I didn’t even really realize were there before, which felt really magical. The sequence of the album was very intentional, and as I started finishing writing songs and looking at them all, this story did start to take shape a little bit. To me, the arc it is partially the story, but it’s also the feeling, I think. I really feel like there’s a feeling that you get travelling through this record. All of that was really intentional, but it wasn’t clear at the beginning. I didn’t write the songs knowing what kind of story I would be telling or how they would be connected. But I had this sense of the feeling, and it really wasn’t even until it was finished and as I was listening to it through and I was reading through all of the lyrics that I was even discovering these points of connection.
I feel like the songs on the album are essentially about love, but more as a means of tracing your relationship with your own self. And I think that sort of self-awareness becomes an especially useful tool on a song like ‘Sorry’s Not Enough’. Could you talk about the making of that song?
That song actually had a really interesting life. That was when I went away for this little writing retreat I did, that was the very first song I wrote, like the first day, and it came out kind of quickly. If it’s not clear from the song, I was really sad, but I was also, I think, apart from the love-related turmoil I was in the midst of, there was a shift in self-awareness that was happening at the time that I started writing the songs. My view of myself was changing in this kind of dark way. I think up until that point, I had really been inclined towards, like, joy and hope and whimsy, and while that is inside the record too, I think this was me trying to understand a way to write and see myself in a lens that wasn’t so sunny.
And then the interesting thing about that song is, the second half of it, the “I’ll try again in the morning, I’ll be okay at the end,” I had a completely different part written for that. It was really loud and honestly really dramatic, and it was a little bit too on the nose and honest about what I was going through at the time. It was very bleak. And it was really satisfying initially when I wrote it, and it stayed that way for a year. We tracked the guitar and we tracked the drums, and it just didn’t feel quite right. When I write songs, I usually write them start to finish, and they pretty much stay that way, I don’t do a lot of editing and moving around. And so I hadn’t experienced this feeling of like, I think I need to change something but I don’t know how. I really didn’t like the song for a long time because of that, I didn’t feel connected to it and I didn’t think that we could make it sound good. And then one day with Eric [Littman, who co-produced the album], we put that section on a loop and took out the vocal part, and I just tried to come up with something different. And it took it took a long time, I tried different melodies and different lyrics, and I think I couldn’t have realized it without all of this time passing that I did want something more hopeful. I wanted there to be that moment of like, mostly for me, No, it’s okay, you’re gonna be okay, Tasha. You’re good.
Yeah, I don’t know if it would sound the same if you had tried to force that sense of hope without letting it breathe for some time. I think it’s sort of emblematic of the arc of the whole record, because it feels like when you tap into that darkness even a little bit, hope starts to take on a different shape. I feel like with this record, the idea of self-care and self-love is still very important, but because it goes into these darker places, they take on new meaning. So I wanted to ask, what has self-love and self-care come to mean for you?
I like that you noticed that. Because I’m older now and living is much harder and my relationships are more complicated, both romantic and with my friends and my family, and my responsibilities are more complicated and the world is more complicated, that inevitably brings more work that I have to do to care for myself. There’s just so many more variables at play as far as my general wellness. I think my self-care is more rooted in figuring out [her dog sneezes] – sorry, that’s my dog. [laughs] One second. [sits with her dog on her lap] It’s like, much more rooted in a responsibility to others. I don’t think in a bad way, I think youth just gives one the luxury of being able to be a little bit like more self-centred. And again, in a very positive way, but there was more luxury to think about everything that I needed. And I was growing, so I was like, How do I take care of myself? And now, it feels more rooted in, How do I care for myself in order to care for the people around me? How do I make sure that I am doing the work I need to do to be a good person to the ones that I love?
And ultimately, that means being good to myself as well. But it feels more serious. I think I had this sense that I would care for myself just because, and now I’m like, Wait, if I don’t care for myself, I’m like, not a good person. [laughs] This is necessary work, because I don’t know how to be a good person if I’m not doing the work to figure out what that looks like.
I think it brings a sort of newfound appreciation for things, not just other people but just the world in general. That’s something I think this record beautifully captures, from like, the seagull’s call to the blueness of the sky. I feel like lyrically, as you put more focus on yourself as a person, you begin to take note of those things around you.
That’s so cool that you noticed that.
I was wondering if you could share one thing that recently brought you joy that maybe wouldn’t have in the past or that you wouldn’t have paid attention to in the same way.
That’s a good question. What’s bringing me joy… Man, I feel like it shouldn’t be so hard for me to answer. I feel like a lot of things bring me joy. Let me think about it for a second…
I mean, this isn’t the most interesting thing, but this dog is actually my girlfriend’s dog, and I’ve been taking more care of him since we moved in together. She was out of town for a couple of days the other week and I was taking care of him alone, which I’d never done before. And we went on a long walk this one day, and I’ve never really gone on a long walk with him by myself, only us together. And it was actually really special. I’m not someone who – I like to walk, but it’s not something that I often choose to do, and I’ve never particularly liked it that much. [laughs] But this walk was really special, and it was one of the first chilly days we had here, and there was something about it that made me really happy. It put me in a really, really good mood, and I don’t know if it was me having this new responsibility for this little dog and being the only one who could take him out every day, I’m not sure. But now we go on a lot of walks, I’m taking him out around the neighbourhood all the time, and I wasn’t really doing that before. There is some kind of new appreciation I think I have for being out walking that I just didn’t have before.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Tasha’s Tell Me What You Miss the Most is out now via Father/Daughter Records.
In this segment, we showcase the most notable albums out each week. Here are the albums out on November 12, 2021:
Continuing her re-recording project, Taylor Swift has released Red (Taylor’s Version), out now via Republic. Following Fearless (Taylor’s Version), the 30-track project features new recordings of every track from her 2012 album, including nine ‘From the Vault’ tracks and collaborations with Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Stapleton, and Ed Sheeran. “Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person,” Swift said of the album in a statement. “It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.”
An Evening With Silk Sonic, the debut album from Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s new project, has arrived via Aftermath Entertainment/Atlantic. The record includes the early singles ‘Leave the Door Open’, ‘Skate’, and ‘Smokin Out the Window’ and features contributions from “special guest host” Bootsy Collins as well as Thundercat, drummer Homer Steinweiss of the Dap-Kings, Kenny ‘Babyface’ Edmonds, James Fauntleroy, and more. “A good song can bring people together – you don’t really have to sing the words ‘Everyone is coming together’,” Mars told Rolling Stone. “Sometimes it’s hard to really do it. You don’t have to say ‘Everyone raise your hand’ – sometimes it hits you just hit the chord and it happens. So that was our mindset with the whole album.”
IDLES have followed up their 2020 album Ultra Mono with CRAWLER, which is out now via Partisan. The 14-song LP was recorded at Real World Studios in Bath during the COVID-19 pandemic and was co-produced by Kenny Beats and guitarist Mark Bowen. The band previewed the album with the previously released singles ‘The Beachland Ballroom’ and ‘CAR CRASH’, both of which arrived with accompanying music videos.
Courtney Barnett has released her third studio album, Things Take Time, Take Time, via Mom+Pop Music/Marathon Artists. The singer-songwriter wrote the follow-up to 2018’s Tell Me How You Really Feel over a period of two years and recorded it towards the end of 2020 and early 2021 in Sydney, Northern NSW and Melbourne alongside producer/drummer Stella Mozgawa (Warpaint, Cate le Bon, Kurt Vile). The record includes the previously released singles ‘Rae Street’, ‘Before You Gotta Go’, and ‘Write A List of Things to Look Forward To’.
Damon Albarn has issued his latest LP, The Nearer the Fountain, More Pure the Stream Flows, via Transgressive. Following 2014’s Everyday Robots, the album was originally conceived as an orchestral piece inspired by Icelandic landscapes. “I took some of these realtime, extreme elemental experiences [of Iceland] and then tried to develop more formal pop songs with that as my source,” Albarn said of the album in a statement. “I wanted to see where that would take me. Sometimes it took me down to Uruguay and Montevideo. Other times I went to Iran, Iceland or Devon. With travel being curtailed, it was kind of nice to be able to make a record that put me strangely in those places for a moment or two.”
Jonny Greenwood‘s original soundtrack to Spencer, the Pablo Larraín-directed Princess Diana biopic starring Kristen Stewart, is out now via Mercury KX. It marks the Radiohead guitarist’s ninth film soundtrack and includes the previously shared single ‘Crucifix’. “I explained to Pablo that there’s lots of baggage attached to classical music in films about the royals,” Greenwood said in an interview with NME. “You either use actual Handel or pastiche Handel. I watched a few royal films, which were full of sweeping shots of Buckingham Palace, with fanfare horns and tinkling harpsichords on top. I wanted instead to emphasise how chaotic and colourful Princess Diana was, in amongst all that baroque tradition. It’s what the film does too.”
Claire Cronin has released her new LP, Bloodless, via Ordinal Records. It marks the Los Angeles-based writer and musician’s third LP, arriving after 2019’s Big Dread Moon and her 2020 memoir Blue Light of the Screen. Cronin recorded it alongside her collaborator and husband Ezra Buchla, with Deerhoof’s John Dieterich handling the mixing. Of making the album in near-total isolation during one of the worst wildfire seasons in California history, Cronin said: “I felt trapped and hopeless and terrified — of the virus, of the fires, of what was going on in American politics. In some ways, death felt far away — numbers of fatalities on the news — but it was also a constant threat.”
Irreversible Entanglements – the alt-jazz collective featuring Camae Ayewa aka Moor Mother, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, double bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes – have released a new record. Open the Gates is out now via Don Giovanni/International Anthem. Following last year’s Who Sent You?, the LP includes the previously released single ‘Key to Creation’ as well as the title track.
Pip Blom, the Dutch four-piece led by the titular Pip Blom, have dropped their sophomore album Welcome Break via Heavenly. The band self-produced the follow-up to 2019’s Boat and recorded it in three weeks at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, England. “This was the second time we were at the same studios so it made it a bit easier for us to make the decision to continue doing it ourselves,” Blom told Gigwse, adding: “I think it’s definitely more polished, and maybe a little bit less DIY. There are probably lots of people who don’t like that choice that we’ve made, but to me, it’s like we are really letting the songs speak for themselves instead of hiding behind lots of distortion and weird noises.”
Jon Hopkins has a new album out titled Music For Psychedelic Therapy (via Domino). His first full-length release since 2018’s Singularity, the record was inspired by a creative expedition he went on in 2018 at Tayos Caves in Ecuador. “It felt like time for a reset, to wait for music to appear from a different place,” Hopkins stated in press materials. “What grew from this experience is an album with no beats, not one drum sound, something that is closer to a classical symphony than a dance / electronica record. Something that is more like having an experience than listening to a piece of music. Maybe something far more emotionally honest than I had been comfortable making before – a merging of music, nature and my own desire to heal.”
Makthaverskan, För Allting; Gov’t Mule, Heavy Load Blues; Lionlimb, Spiral Groove; Aesop Rock & Blockhead, Garbology; Rod Stewart, The Tears of Hercules; The Dodos, Grizzly Peak; Amanda Shires, For Christmas; Little Mix, Between Us.
Grimes has launched a new “AI girl group” called NPC. According to press materials, the group features infinite members that “can be voted in or out, except for core members such as the baby Warnymph.” Today, NPC has released their first official single, ‘A Drug From God’, which is a collaboration with British house DJ Chris Lake. Check it out below.
The project serves as “a vehicle for experimentation in new technologies as they become available such as generative characters and music, diff types of animation, ai assisted art as well as spiritual technology in that Grimes can create as other people in order to reduce the psychic pain of being in the public eye,” the press release continues. “NPC will hone the concepts of Art Angels and Miss Anthropocene, finally manifesting the endless characters in Grimes’ head. NPC can do all the things humans cannot. NPC will eventually be playable, customizable, and able to cater to each individual listener’s unique desires. Decentralized Popstardom. Made, not Born.”
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Beyoncé has released ‘Be Alive’, the song that soundtracked the King Richard film trailer. The movie stars Will Smith and centers on Richard Williams while he coaches and raises his daughters, Venus and Serena Williams. Listen to ‘Be Alive’ below.
Last year, Beyoncé shared the single ‘BLACK PARADE’, which earned her a Grammy for Best R&B Performance. She also released the visual album Black Is King, featuring music from 2019’s The Lion King: The Gift.
King Richard is out in theaters and HBO Max on November 19.
For some listeners, Engine of Hell might sound like the calm after the storm, the kind that isn’t peaceful but dreadfully eerie. Coming off the heels of her recent collaborations with sludge metal band Thou – the 2020 opus May Our Chambers Be Full and this year’s The Helm of Sorrow EP – and despite its similarly grim title, Emma Ruth Rundle’s latest is not only a departure from the merciless grandiosity of those projects, but also from most of the prolific singer-songwriter’s own solo work. Fans of 2016’s Marked for Death or 2018’s On Dark Horses will be quick to note the absence of the reverb-soaked, full-band arrangements and atmospheric textures that fleshed out her gothic brand of folk, even if the reasons behind the shift aren’t fully accounted for. On a handful of the songs, she trades guitar for piano, returning to the first instrument she learned as a way of accessing some of her earliest and most traumatic memories. Rundle has understandably refrained from discussing these experiences at length, and for all its musical intimacy, the record feels less like a conversation between her and the listener than simply with herself. Yet for anyone who cares enough to listen, it opens up the same portal.
At one of the points in which Engine of Hell leans away from poetic ambiguity, we get a relatively straightfoward explanation for the album’s stark presentation: “So quiet, the melody I sing that’s just mine/ Is the center of my troubles,” she sings on ‘The Company’. Consisting mostly of her voice and chosen instrument, you could say the songs are stripped down to their purest form, but then it feels like this is just how they’ve always existed. You can even hear her fingers sliding up and down the fretboard, little imperfections left in, “the breath between things no one says” – all delivered not with the blurry distortions of a lofi recording, but with suffocating clarity. These are mostly live takes, unfiltered and raw. When additional embellishments do creep in, like the violin on ‘Citadel’, they are subtle, lone, and evocative.
But there is nothing cautious, uninspired, or weightless about the music. One of the most remarkable things about it is the way Rundle can conjure heaviness using the simplest and often unconventional tools. Though it sits at a fascinating crossroads between the styles of Tori Amos, Phil Elverum, and Sibylle Baier, Engine of Hell appears to spring from a place of unflinching vulnerability and isolation all on its own. Not only does it forego the layers of instrumentation that would add heft to her personal, reflective lyricism, it also eschews the kind of direct confessionalism that would normally stand in their shadow. You don’t connect to the songs so much as you become immersed their impeccable flow, ricocheting between a few scattered details (“Down at the methadone clinic we waited/ Hoping to take home your cure/ The curdling cowards, the crackle of china/ You say that it’s making you pure”), references both biblical and ancient, labyrinth-like recollections of the past.
Wherever it comes from or takes her, Rundle uses her rich, poignant lyricism less as an interpretive canvas than an avenue for emotional expression, and the way she dances through it is utterly mesmerizing. Music journalist Emma Madden put it best in her interview with Rundle for Stereogum, a description I can’t seem to escape: “It sounds like your voice is being born.” Her voice is naked and exposed, yes, but it goes beyond that; it often sounds like it’s forming itself through the words, exploring the confines and possibilities of stretching them this or that way. “Straight to the hangman’s noose, are we born this way?” she ponders on ‘Blooms of Oblivion’, “Handing down a fistful of sorries you will never say/ I love you.” Then, she commands an arresting performance by pushing around the edges of two of the most common words in the English language: “See? Say.” She does this throughout the record, stressing the core refrain not for dramatic effect but in search of some kind of release.
This is only one way in which Rundle maintains tension throughout Engine of Hell. Another is the way she applies the musical fluidity that has marked her discography to the record’s minimalist framework. This might be a spare singer-songwriter album, but it has little in common with the acoustic folk of Rundle’s 2014 debut Some Heavy Ocean. Even the traditional structure of some of the tracks tends to fade out of view as you follow the movements within a song, which, on songs like the harrowing ‘Body’, align vividly with Rundle’s storytelling. There are a couple of exceptions in the album’s second half: ‘Razor’s Edge’ has an almost adolescent warmth to it that comes into contrast with Rundle’s sharp lyricism, while ‘Citadel’ most closely echoes her earlier work. Unlike most of the songs here, they could easily be reimagined through the language of heavy music, but their power stems from Rundle’s frail, solitary presence.
So when that aloneness is broken through the occasional backing vocal or the haunting echo of an unfamiliar instrument, you might find yourself wondering what lies on the other side. And when tenderness does shine though, even devastatingly so, these moments are hard to miss: the delicate ‘Dancing Man’, the way the piano on ‘Body’ mirrors the embrace the singer is grieving. But when Rundle sings about how you “leave knowing nothing’s resolved,” you take it as given. You don’t expect a way out. She isn’t playing by the rules, after all, but turns the aimlessness of the journey into something gripping. Yet something of a miracle happens at the end, on the outwardly redemptive ‘In My Afterlife’. The catharsis is explicit: “And now we’re free” are the last lines on the record. But her voice, so far floating through the ether, spins upward in a way that gestures towards transcendence of the simplest kind: letting the light in, taking in air. Returning.
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