Taking an illuminated stroll through the pavement stones and sides of buildings where sunlight and shadow compare dependent on time and place of where feet point.

Alexander Cargill paints tributaries of instrumental structures through synthesized patterns in tribute to Bromham, a place where family stepped, built, began, ended.

In morsels of melody, Cargill provides postage stamp sketches of the different aspects of a place that sounds like it’s built amongst clouds that live in the garden.

Sampled historical statements, and guitars pouncing like a cat to a ladybug work together on “A Word From The Chairman Of The Parish Council.”

Bass notes like desperate seeking down a dark alley, while piano notes hang like tinged halos overhead.

This is a historical study, a pile of dried leaves, tidy, set, never finished.

Wind will rush again. People will wake back up.

Capture a moment, a past, as things keep on.

In one of our more controversial viewpoints, any release more than a single song is considered an EP. Once we get to 7 songs, that’s another discussion about albums, for another day. But with two new songs, Houston’s Alien Eyelid, has brought a new EP to the world. Alien Eyelid emerged last year, with a band name that sounds like something soaked in synthesizers and glow paint chaos, but this music sounds like open stretches of cactus highway, and scorching temperatures where cow skulls bleach, and lizards sun on red rocks. Heading into 2024, we’ve already been handed this EP, a gift, for anyone lassoed by the direct brilliance of what is going on here.

With pedal steel, harmonica, and tin pail harmonies, these songs could be easily defined in a specific vein and left on the side of a backroad. But Alien Eyelid, much like their name, deliver just off the target, seemingly on purpose, to develop anything but another nostalgic drawing of a boot.

There’s a depth in the arrangements, the lyrics, the crafting of these songs, that carries the thread of what strengths Alien Eyelid delivers in every moment.

An immediacy in the songs lands in Tyler Morris’s voice. Somewhere between a behind-the-counter voice announcing the next plate ready for pick up, and the brown dust coated larynx of a post-dust devil walk through town, Morris calls and howls, sings and stares the listener straight in the eyes, with every intention of layering over the twirling keys of the bar room piano and references to Tammy Wynette. These songs blend in hooking harmonies, with stories that have to be real, simply by the conviction in the way Morris yelps.

The casual layers of acoustic strums, and gentle drum drives structure the “saw dust floor,” for bow-and-arrow electric guitar lines to trickle in the background alongside notes sliding like a coating of ice on the power lines, and harmonica breaths like frogs in the pond late at night.

“I Didn’t Mean To,” attacks a situation that slipped out of the hands of the subject, and as the band peaks into a distant mountain across the distorted view of desert heat, the story doesn’t resolve, but the invitation to sort it out keeps coming like a tumbleweed blowing across the keys of a piano.

Morris sings:

“Like a fool I walked up to you/ And when I did I stepped on your shoes,”

And in this simple record shop mishap, a two-layer concept of the immediacy of causing a mistake piles on top of the depths of loosening a sliding away, straight into a key change.

“Not Ready Yet,” strums right into a confused place of emptying glasses, and forgotten songs sputtering out of a jukebox, described in similar words to right where this song sits. “Loneliness, regret, and sorrow.” The way the bass steps into the frame and lifts the heavy heartedness, driving the acoustic into the wider space of where this song is headed, Alien Eyelid don’t let a simple fireside strum stay there. As Morris sings about not being ready to “give up the ghost,” a flute ambles into the song like the sound of a memory, a loss, an actual ghost, and carries out of the bar, to the street where inevitably the character in the song will walk or stumble away from this momentary reflection.

Between these two songs Alien Eyelid make yet another case for why the music this band is creating, the stories, the sounds, are a place every listener shouldn’t just drive through on their way to a bigger city, but a place to stop for the day, and look around.

The exposed way veins can be seen under the skin on a paper-thin hand. The blood pumping to the places where the sickness holds.

It’s the watery eyes of watching something develop into something unknown.

It’s the attempted quiet, and very loud, of sleeping with noise carrying on in another room.

It makes the line, “These nights all I wanna do is sleep, but I can’t,” sound like an actual state to be listening to this song in.

Milwaukee’s, Barely Civil, in releasing this new single, pairs their dueling strengths of the quiet of a glass of water that’s been sitting on the dresser for a week, with the brash bashing of voices peaking for the sake of hearing the existence of the sound inside of lungs.

For every understated attempt Connor Erickson makes in singing from between the crack in a door, the majority of “other” voices prepares to call out from beneath the banister, back and forth in a conversational chorus that continues the cracking of an ice continent while trying to check on the maladies that initially created these confusions.

The continual, gentle approach of asking, “Are you better now?” slashed by the growing drum beat and red coiled guitar strums, mirroring the vocal differences in second-to-second conflicts all collide into a balanced place of wrestling and rearranging everything and everywhere for something that doesn’t seem to have easy answers, or even a landing place to look around.

Barely Civil collects all of the needed pieces to deliver a single that stays the course of the purpose and plan, while differentiating second to second in ways that keep the song revived in every decision and movement.

Nothing feels unnecessary, we need all of this to get from the starting build of the intro, all the way to the end, where the answer may never have been delivered, but the band brought everything they could to manage this place.

If this is the beginning of an entire album, we all better listen closely now, because there will continue to be a lot to dig up and dig through. The opening line, “This is growth,” feels entirely appropriate for a band that casually just dropped one of the best songs I’ve heard this year, and can’t see it not continuing to stand feet above anything else going on out here.

(Take This To Heart)

Be Safe circles like vultures coating the cloudless sky, with iron weight, moving in streaks of grays and heavy shadow. It’s the glimmer of the guitars over the top of bass moving like furniture shifting in the night.

It’s a deep voice, reflective as a room full of framed pictures, with glass showing the mirrored images of everything, just slightly less sharp.

It’s recalling memories, but never being 100% sure the story went EXACTLY like that.

Over the course of these 9 songs, Be Safe, arranges staircases of strums and drum beats, that continue to rise like a wave over the top of a mountain peak. It’s a sound that keeps rising, but viewed from the heavy eyes of the full moon.

“In A House,” wraps and grips, then lets up like rain water tumbling down a grate in the gutter, before grabbing hold again.

“That Kind,” opens like echoes in a basement, but no one is actually there calling out.

Be Safe works in the pains of regret, the confusion of memory, the reflection of hurt and causing hurt, and it tumbles and twists in sliced structures like the beams under a bridge.

An album to sit and listen to, as the buildings grow from the ground.

(Count Your Lucky Stars)

Open, endless, the cavern under the ground, a seemingly forever tankard of cold water, trickling at the top of the earth to soften the crust in a nearly freezing bath.

Cabbaggage stirs the pot on the stove slowly, but continually. Nothing stands still, nothing stagnant, it’s a movement. The streams of sound, like airplanes crying across the clouds, leads the top of it all, while in the houses and the trees, there are sleeping creatures and changing temperatures, inside and outside.

It’s these massive moments where the song comes up over the ridge and the canyon never stops. It’s the drums on “Moving Away,” fighting the ghosts and engines swirling like two colors of paint in the same sink.

The cold eyed chime of “Homeless” turning chords into fruit that never rots, but instead becomes glass.

This, a country of its own, that generates the next mile as you listen and realize what it is you hear in the form of the city or pasture or road that has just appeared.

(Submarine Broadcasting Company)

When title track, “Daylily,” ends, abrupt as a car crash disappearing into a roadside portal, the bullying of the guitars that relentlessly chatter like wolf teeth biting into the side of a deer, the moment of quiet feels relieving like air escaping from a balloon.

And it feels like +CAREGIVER+ recognizes the relentless nature of what unfolded, and the band lives up to its name, giving the listener a moment to gather the shredded pieces of what just happened before things heat back up moments into, “Doll’s Eyes.”

The balance this EP holds between the absolute devastation of the sky and the ground and anything else on the path, being torn apart, and the gentleness of a soft surf lapping the stones of an indistinguishable beach, keeps the ebbing and flowing of the panic and peace in perfected balance.

+CAREGIVER+ has a single vision of the sound and scope they want to create within, and never let up. For only carrying across three songs, the level this EP gets to so quickly leaves the thrashing about feeling like there needs to be more space to let more split apart.

The vocals move across the entire map of possibilities from the soft eyed understanding of something massive outside of the window, to the devouring screams of wild animals, champions of the forest, never giving up ground.

+CAREGIVER+ needs to release more music quickly, we need to hear where this goes.

(Burning Moment Records)

Late last year, straight out of Chittenango, New York, Casual Technicians came ambling and rambling with a cool, four track EP. It was an attention-grabbing mash of sounds, and lyrics that played like the color brown peeling itself off of a laminated wall.

Now we’re being invited to a preview of a whole Casual Technicians album (!) with this single that flutters with tambourine shakes and bass thumps bumping like a small boat hitting a sea wall. Keyboard chords and multiple voices bouncing over the top off all of this clatter, like opening a drawer and all sorts of artifacts and items roll forward at once.

Electric guitar squeals over parts in the song like some kind of night bat carrying a whole piece of fruit through a sleeping neighborhood. The same thumping spinal cord of the song continues to carry, while Casual Technicians work on framing the rhythm with a continuing stream of sounds and vocal movements to keep the song never feeling repetitive, though the chorus continues to be sung.

As evident on last year’s EP, Casual Technicians write lyrics with angles and layers in specific narratives, yet not completely understandable. It’s a development of words and parts of stories swirling like water from the meal washing down a gaping drain.

One of the best lyrics so far this year, “Looks like the fox found the freezer so goodbye appetite,” lands with some sort of profound recognition, but what is the fox? and where did the appetite go, instead of the food? This line is followed by a sea-sick guitar sliding around in a response that feels like it tells the rest of this fox’s story.

Halfway through, the song breaks down to voices smoothing a false ending, like a fairy tale inside of seaweed. Casual Technicians aren’t done, they stored up the best for last, with an final stomp that continues thumping, as ribbons and strings tie the song up, and the chorus presses on to the end of the time we get here.

There’s something simple, AND something so complicated in what Casual Technicians are doing with such ease. It’s song crafting that works to play as a simple single for anyone to enjoy, or the abilities of keen musical minds slathering the track with as many working parts as possible. Like a machine with a sense of humor. A piece of kitchen equipment with a human brain. It’s a sound that could only be crafted by a band with a name like this.

(Repeating Cloud)

Massive costume monster feet stomping through Gelatinous Earth. I have great news for Danis Lacey, mastermind behind Cool Sounds, this continuation of insect-themed aesthetic is working EXACTLY with the sounds coming out of this project.

Cool Sounds returns with a single that moves like an island floating through outer space inside of a lilac. A mass of open ended forms and wriggling life, hidden in the folds and corners of just looking around.

“BUG0BEAT,” rolling like a dust devil full of earthworms and lush leaves, spins with multiple instrumental flourishes that pile like a tower inside of an ant hill. Bongo drum base, bass dips like chips in a pool, guitar glides like a wing down the front of a hot steel slide, and then the first choir enters singing from the depths of a sea teeming with lifeforms scientists are still working to track down.

The middle dips into a sliding acoustic moment of reflection but immediately skitters right back into the trademarked felt-finger bass tone and percussive breeze trailing away but never fading out. This song moves like one gust of wind off of neon sun that changes colors as the minutes progress.

This instrumentation works in a double vision. There’s the crust of this seaweed planet, with straight forward songwriting: easy to access and continuously leading the listener on a candied path of enjoyable choruses and easy instrumentation. But the exposition of the lower levels works in seeming micro-decisions, as Lacey dials in every tone and note, extra instrument and sound, until the 3 minutes of this song feel packed like when they stuff a lobster tail full of crab meat and land it on top of a steak.

This is a rich delivery of an initial place to land and take off from into the next phase of literally one of the coolest sounds we have on our planet.

(Chapter Music)

If we were to make a Multiverse of artists assembling into the most powerful creators in modern musical existence, Fabiano Do Nascimento and Sam Gentle would be a first call.

These two minds collaborating on this album is more than we could have hope for in the FIRST MONTH of 2024.

Fabiano Do Nascimento holds a certain ability to turn a corner with a chord change, or pick out a note at the end of a draw that angles the entire situation in a different direction, and back again.

Sam Gendel a creative overflow of threads and ropes warping sound and existence into new plains and planes.

Fabiano Do Nascimento plays the 7-string guitar on this album like the genesis of train tracks.

Sam Gendel floats notes from a soprano saxophone like clouds shaping into actual train cars.

The two mingle notes and structures on a path unfolding through a fog that becomes a glass full of cold water.

This is an album to let breathe, froth and foam, or settle into a waveless sea, and it all lands in new lands worthy of simply sitting an considering.

This is a giant of an album with two instruments relentlessly creating anything in a matter of seconds.

There’s a lot of good news to share with this new EP.

To start, the release of “Vibrations Now” marks the return of MOST EXCELLENT music blog Austin Town Hall’s, record label side, getting back into music releasing!

The other good news is Fantastic Purple Spots lives up to their name in the form of excellent music with uniquely shaped dabs of color in sonic form from start to finish.

From the onset of tiny chimes and rotating repetition on EP starter, “Wondering, Wandering,” the tone of this duo sets up to be a long tunnel shrinking and growing like wormholes, in space OR underground, dependent on the worms.

Throughout this EP, the utilization of repeated words, gives room for electric guitars humming like cloudy tree lines, or city blocks filled with exhaust, to wave ever so slightly, as if reality is bending into something more fantastic, but not completely.

It’s a winding path like snakeskin perfectly left as a casing that mimics the wriggling lifeform that’s hiding in the garden somewhere else now. The form is set, the understanding there, but the effects of the depths in the way all of these sounds converge creates something out of nothing. It’s a slow pace like a river beginning to feel the grip of freezing temperatures bringing it to a hault. A horse slowing at a stoplight.

On title track, “Vibrations Now,” the way the foggy lead singing is masked by a quiet choir sounds like what seashells would sing if they had vocal cords. And maybe they do. After listening to this, that under the surface magic seems possible.

Within the 5 songs that make up this EP, Fantastic Purple Spots, bends notes and time to fit a picture that’s being painted as the music progresses. “Flyways of the Purple Spotted Tern,” strums like sunshine in a bucket, while a spoken explanation of the title character lays over in a moment of clarity amidst the waving beaded doorways of the previous songs.

This is a quick listen, that varies enough song to song, moment to moment, to leave the EP settled in the category of a triumph in congruence and difference used correctly. Everything lands like bird feet on the same powerline, but dependent on which side of the intersection, the view is mountains or it’s a garbage truck, a person running backwards, or a sinkhole leading to a parallel universe.

(Austin Town Hall Records)

If you follow what we do closely, and Flight Mode still isn’t one of your favorite bands in the world, let’s try AGAIN.

In anticipation of their new EP releasing next month, this new single appears in the perfected balance this Oslo group creates within where the gentle and the strong work as one thread woven through a sweater your dad let you borrow and you never returned. It’s a place of recognition from a past, while refreshing like the sun on a screen.

Sjur Lyseid sings like fishing line dipping into a lake you visited in the past, while the guitars peak in coarse strums under the weight and pressure of heavy, scratching strings.

The line, “We’ve been taking it easy / the animals and me/‘ Cause a life without words/ has never made it any worse,” rings like a bell in the quiet of dreaming. A song full of words calling for the practice of rest and quiet.

Flight Mode gathers a sharp edge on this new single, but never loses the brushes of blankets stacked in the corner for when the flutters of snowflakes become heavy weight on a roof.

(Tiny Engines)

The opening lines of this song,

“No matter what happens for the rest of this year /we’ll celebrate your birthday /April 25thYour present’s in the mail/Don’t think it’ll get here in time for me to hide it where you couldn’t see,”

has to be one of the most immediately engaging storylines to start a song in recent memory.


The words , relatable as a shirt that’s been hanging in the closet, and rarely worn for years, work perfectly with the easy acoustic movement, and gentle paws on drums.

This song approaches as an easy spinning pinwheel in a tiny garden bed by the stairs out front, but the depths of this promise to celebrate a birthday in the midst of years that never seem to line up anymore is anything but easy.

It’s the candles purchased for a cake, and forgotten in the cabinet, now the numbers don’t match up when found again.

For a band with a name that immediately references a specific feeling known or unknown, it can be imagined, nervously felt. This song aligns with that same turbulent internal uncertainty on a level that leaves everything like the worry in the back of a mind, “did I close the garage door?” “Did I unplug the space heater?”

Too late to find out.

Every time Hoorsees releases something new it unsurprisingly sounds so good, works so easily, it feels like the kind of music that must be engineered in a lab. How do these 4 people from Paris arrange and create continually perfect songs?

There’s a quick handed work in the guitar lines that sling out crisp strums and leads that drill like missiles under the tallest buildings in the city. Everything surrounds the vocal melodies to boost the catchiest parts into the sky. With this new album, aptly titled, Hoorsees pick up where they left off on 2022’s very good “A Superior Athlete,” with an even deeper seeming intention to create a 9-song relay of perfection. Trading off vocal duties, the dual lead singing keeps the tracks guessing as to where the next track will head, but the cool breeze of the pastiche never shifts. It’s a carefree attitude that undercuts the mechanical accuracy of the drums driving everything down the same slick highway backed by bass work that doesn’t just hold a place, but digs in to asphalt and makes sure it works in exact measures.

The greatest advantage Hoorsees offers the listener is the unneccessary need for context. If you’ve never heard a Hoorsees song before, you can literally pick anything on the menu and get right into what’s going on here. From last year’s exceptional single “Ikea Boy,” to “Art School,” or “Presidential Holiday,” Hoorsees makes it as easy as possible to land in these strutting tracks without needing anything but an ear to listen.

An easy, early front-runner for an album EVERYONE should be listening to. Why isn’t everyone already? Hoorsees should be the biggest band in the world.

(Kanine Records)

British Columbia’s, Hverheij, develops sounds of growth, expansion, granular existence through the space and pace of computerized tones blending with fingers purposely mimicking the sounds we don’t hear. The lengthening of a bone. A tree experiencing leaves. This is a place to cut space into the sounds of natural movements, becoming.

The hushed sounds Hverheij creates across these 12 songs, gives time and space for each listener, cued by the song titles, to imagine and recognize the creative process of sound shaping moments so monumental, yet viewed as the everyday of existence. The two-fold work of ghost harmonies and patterns sinking under the up front melodies of otherworld keyboard tones, and mysterious rhythms, creates a helmet around the ears, to get lost within.

A title like, “Receding Vapors,” leaves the room with an experience of that exact concept through sound. A magic act of making the reality of the song, feel like its happening all around.

An album to explore through quietly hearing, and not rushing through.

Where the past two singles from very upcoming new album “Obsidian Wreath,” relentlessly batter the listener with a furious crushing, “Kindling,” moves like faint lights on a horizon. The slow movements of guitars being dragged up from the bottom of a well, before drums kick into the familiar crushing as vocals spew like poison oozing from the leaves of nocturnal plants.

With a feature from Harper Boyhtari and Logan Gaval of Greet Death, Infant Island surrounds haunted words, plunging with the story of a ship sinking, without any place for hope. The fires setting in the sounds of guitars spouting like murky sirens collect silt and sand along the edges, as the depth and dark continue growing like a nighttime settling over a soupy rainstorm. It just keeps merging over the song itself, until the thick of the lagoon being built allows no fresh water to enter.

The gutting of the screaming that torments the second part of the song relentlessly pushes the borders of the haze to a limit that allows no getting out, or running. Just the sludge of trudging to the end of drum hits that fade back into the unknown of strings picking a place to land, a brave bird settling in the stagnancy of the gloom.

(Secret Voice)

Cloudless skies becoming coated in thin, wooly transparencies as the day stretches to the dark part of a winter afternoon. Where the billows, like faceless sheep, hang low above a frosted field, or a plummeting temperature in the desert. The Infinites move in where sun cover becomes a necessary existence. There’s something like a bright teal star stitched on a plain, navy blue hat about the sound of this song. It’s a magically unique sparkling liquid in an otherwise normal drinking glass.

The play between these heavy driving repetitive rolls on guitars, overlayed with gentle melodies breathed like a lung capturing needed oxygen in a snowstorm. Other guitars pierce the continuations of chords rattling like bones in a closet, with solos that grow like mountains and then fall back asleep at the sound of the hypnotizing notes repeating under the current. Again.

The chorus, “She found me,” lifts like a dodgeball lost on a lake at sunset.

But neither the fierce bite of the sporadically placed solos, hot as lava rivers through a neighborhood, or the dove wing flap of the choruses stays long enough to choose a side. The heavy and the soft, an anvil on a pillow.

It’s a purely captivated place of

red AND blue,

cold AND warm,

liquid AND solid.

The sound of turning both faucets on full blast to fill a thimble with perfectly middle temperature waters.

The progress The Infinites define as the song ambles along, moves precisely, like a fleet of geese vacating a field of grass, for a different patch of grass in new surroundings. And then again, and again. Restlessness in the seeking rest.

I’ve already heard a lot of songs this month, and this one keeps rising to the surface as a repeated listen. A place to lean back and forward at the same time. A close listen, a distant sleep.

(Meritorio Records)

The reverberating sound, that continues repeating, like the flutter of an insect that won’t fly away on a summer evening, builds a lasting place to land, while the rest of this song unfolds like a tiny model world of a city of pyramids.

Keyboard lines run up and down the sides, while the whirring of a kitchen item continues mixing for something eventually baked and sliced.

It’s a layering like cloth stacked on an organized shelf.

Lyndhurst, creates in the scalpel slicing, and butter knife spread in one movement.

This song continues weaving and working, turning corners into deeper chambers, without a specified landing point on a map.

It’s categories blending into one bigger question or conversation.

Spin the dial, hold the kite string, the wind will still wash by when it pleases.

Keep an eye on the horizon, stand completely still, trucks still drive past when they want.

See this track as the introductory invitation to what Marly Lüske is full releasing at the end of March. A melody chipping like bark scratching off of a thin tree. The change from the initial chirping into the shadowed, and then back again. A drawing on a rock, left to be noticed by someone taking the time to notice the shapes of the rocks in the garden bed.

It clicks like typewriter keys spelling a message only the writer will ever read.

The changes in shape of the sound work like holes dug in dirt for seeds that birds will carry if they end up this way.

The growing atmosphere underneath it all slips under the door, fog from the lake, now a tea cozy.

A track that sounds like a face making movements to express an emotion that words aren’t capable of carrying.

The concept of vines that weave along the texture of brick and stone to cover over a window instead of hanging a curtain.

The leaf and flower shading the otherwise reflective glass, but with slim spaces for bits of light and view to gather within the intertwining vertical garden. An approach for privacy without completely coating the distant landscapes with paint.

Kalamazoo, Michigan’s, Memory Cell, creates starts and stops in stretches of song that formulate together like the incremental motion of a creeping vine growing up an exterior wall. On their new 3 track EP, “Holding On To It,” this four-piece utilizes the basics of guitars, drums, and vocals to congregate sounds in slowing and speeding patterns, like trying to correct airplane wings churned by outside pressures and turbulence.

Knives in the sea, hilts under the water, blades gleaming in the surf. A gaze could miss the small silver slices, but they move in succinct synchronization either way.

“Portal,” begins where this EP eventually ends. The bookend of this three song trail will close with the same friction dozing off. The opening atmosphere topples under drums pointing forward as guitars, like the spindles of a staircase set pattern, but the dust on the surfaces of everything around them leaves a slight note of something being “off,” in the room. Adjusted slightly out of place.

And as the EP progresses, the pacing and arranging moves like a jigsaw puzzle built to completion, but with some pieces forced into incorrect places, so the image almost resembles the box, but with blues landed in yellow patterns, dot against lines. It’s three cohesive tracks that work together like a familiar room, but everything slightly shifted so it couldn’t be easily navigated in a moonless nighttime. Each second that passes opens more opportunity for this band to make a decision that changes what has been, up to this moment.

“Portal” plays for less than 3 minutes, and the amount of terrain traversed creates like a much longer stretch of time and sound. Memory Cell uses every second. There is not a single spot of filler on this EP. Kale’s vocals carry through the songs like a dimming flashlight in an under street tunnel. Melody guides the songs to the next parts, but with a hush like ice in a glass with no drink.

“Shapes,” gathers and disperses with guitars overlapping in semi-circle movement. The leads build a structure that falls apart only to be built back again and again. In the center of the song, the repeated patterns take breaks for notes like hollow rocks to ring out and then fold back into the original patterns. It’s a song that sounds exactly like its title. If shapes could be cut out of sound, Memory Cell discovered the formula to do so.

The EP closes with “Shadows,” which drives right out of “Shapes,” with a sharp turn. The longest of the three songs dribbles in murky light, like a dawn when thick cloud cover takes the morning longer than usual to come to light. The signature developments in guitar work ring again in strict structures, mirroring the vocals, or maybe the other way around. Everything slows, as Evan’s drumming slices cymbal hits like a thin dagger through vegetables. The bass globs notes like a flat tire halting the whole vehicle. Inches of feedback nearly end the song, chiming and sputtering, as the second half continually breaks apart. Not a dying star, just a curtain of night sky falling to reveal some unknown structure behind it.

A ten-minute journey that feels like hours of hiking through a world recreated in steel and light and lack of light, spider webs, and wasp wings, and bells without a chime.

Returning after last January’s great EP “Tydblik,” Mercedes Maresca, brings four new, short pieces on “Ushinatta.”

Muted drum beats roll along, as synthetic tones and sequences work from under the ground to the surface, like a surge of worms rising to the current rains.

It’s a test in recognizing patterns that hold the moments, while expanding like math equations without being noticed completely. The micro- sounds shift layers along with steady tom fills.

The result works in a certain lunar shadow effect. It sounds like the pale light reflection casting blue shadows in a sculpture garden. It’s an uncertainty that almost soundtracks heart racing fear, but slowed to a walking pace.

Piano notes plunge like a clean rag into warm suds.

The bass notes hanging like a boat anchor resting against an old tree trunk.

The pattering of the notes up above mingling with the heavenly tones of the color of a pearl.

Haze has been lost, the day is clear.

The funeral dirge down the road meets the quiet of a hand holding another hand.

The silence in a tattoo on an arm.

It passes like a gust of wind and brushes up the dirt like a haircut for a stone.

The clock on the wall falls when no one is home.

Now the seconds skip around a little, backwards and then back on time.

Plunge under cold waters. Chasing a strand of gold. A necklace? A ray of light? A sea snake?

Something shimmering in the bubbled collage, away, out of arm’s length, and swirling farther.

Gatineau, Québec’s Nick Schofield, lets the fingerprints on piano keys shower like an unexpected rainwash, traveling over every petal and leaf, in a gesture of goodwill to nourish the immovable.

Each song, buoyant, surpassing the horizon line, lifts. It’s a recording of a night sky breaking apart as the sun slow as an owl’s eye, opens, watching the cars and tiny buildings shiver in the early temperatures.

Something hopeful resonates throughout the bits of percussive texture, clarinet winds, skeletons of violin lines. Schofield connects it all, shuttering the temptation to try to make more of what is so obviously already working.

It’s a well built stair structure. There doesn’t need to be a second floor. Just notice the craftsmanship of the stairs right here.

The album centralizes itself around Schofield improvising on the piano, and those gathered around the creations fold their sounds and ideas into the batter like a pan heading into an oven that will return with something rich and fluffing over the sides.

This experience of textures, of designs leaves no crumb in any corner. It’s a complete work, a pathway to walk the entirety of. Ignore every door.

James Smith writes tinctures of songs with words and instrumentation that unspools into just exactly what’s going on and has for a long time. As Good Good Blood, Smith consistently releases songs upon songs that spare the frills of overdoing anything, for the honest analyses of life from the view of guitars and voices and cups and yard tools, and gloves, and walking trails.

James Smith is a fountain of creativity, a brain that seems to never stop thinking of the next thing to create and put to paper and record. And now we have a new project Smith calls Obelisk Grove.

Obelisk Grove grows and teems in any direction but a voice buttering over the chords of a guitar.

It’s loud like a trash truck out on the street dumping everything you decided not to keep.

It’s the warm light of a fire starting inside of the tube of a television.

It’s pained like loss creeps in to the parts that were serenading the quiet nights when everything seems completely fine.

It’s dreams you can’t wake up from.

It’s robotic and menacing, windy and furious.


But James Smith doesn’t let these songs go like a happenstance collection of noise for the sake of making a racket. It’s more like the perfect lines and laces of a racquet, but shuffled up into shapes and distortions to remind places that needed a bandage or an “I’m Sorry” card, but it never got mailed.

Obelisk Grove mutates and morphs in directions unexpected, but continually exciting to listen to.

A good moment happens anytime Pile releases anything new. To start 2024 with this new EP kicks off a new year with a massive immediacy of what this year could look like for new music.

Pile, creates as a trio, in depths that can land like a needle through thin fabric, or an entire orchestra playing in the middle of the heaviest rainstorm. Pile have crafted five songs with a certain buoyancy in the sound that moves the way a distant balloon would ride the air movements of wind blowing through mountains ranges.

Within these five songs seems a similarity in tone, a movement in purpose that parses out uniqueness while carrying a common theme. It’s a tray of different gemstones, with different cuts and angles, colors and textures, but the light moves through them the same.

Rick Maguire’s voice, confident and witnessing something monumental, reestablishes where Pile last left off. It’s granite, it’s the thickness of a tree trunk. The words and the delivery feel heavy like a handful of coins in a jacket pocket. It’s the end of opening track “Scaling Walls,” leaving the listener with the lyrics, “The haul is long and I left my brain at home / It’s almost dawn and my feet still hang below.” Pile consistently captures weight in the sound, the words, the vocals. Something that moves through the room the way a draft breezes, while not alienating the listener into isolation. The warmth of a fireplace can be felt on the edges of the room, just in patches.

The sound of snow collecting on roofs of the keyboard that begins, “Only For A Reminder,” melts into the sharp plunges of spears in guitars and feedback. And the commonality stays in Maguire’s sure-eyed voice pressing into the dartboard bullseye of the purpose in the sound.

Pile never proves a moment to have been crafted in frivolity, nothing happens just to fill space. The descending, haunted piano in “Only For A Reminder,” as the words, “But they can count on those closest to them / Only for a reminder,” collects like discarded parts of sliced winter vegetables in the basin of the sink, before an extra minute of instrumentals swirls to silence.

As only these five songs guide just shy of 20 minutes, the beauty of acoustic guitar stemming in between chords and progressions that feel like waking up with an injury you feel like you forgot happened as you slept, resurfaces in all of the synapsis clicking back into place as the reality of another winter day begins.

Pile creates in subtle relentlessness. It’s not a sound to relax to, though there could be moments that feel like an invitation to slump into a chair. No matter how relaxation may be attempted, the dagger in the brain of worry can’t be quelled. See the steady, otherworld guitar lead on “Exits Blocked,” that eventually lead Maguire to just open his mouth and let out a sound. The other side of an echo.

It's the sound of a restless sleep. The kind of dreaming that makes waking up feel like a relief. A thermometer in the mouth that keeps pressing the number closer to emergency. But not yet. It’s rocks pouring down onto the highway. It’s an animal hearing a rustle in the distance and freezing to try to shape the sound into evidence. Pile stays consistent here in the best of what they create. Five songs dialed like a phone number memorized since childhood. Call it.

(Exploding In Sound)

Recently a video released of this volcano exploding in Iceland. The beginning of the video is this warming light as the lava is working to surface, and then this deluge of orange melted rock gushing out of every open crevice in the earth starts pouring. It’s this panicked moment of the hottest liquid from inside of the world appearing and melting everything in sight. And people are standing near the trajectory to witness it. Wearing normal shoes, and just filming the possibility of this river of death accidentally, possibly turning on them. The sound of this watching something so destructive rests in the tension Powerwasher builds on this new single. The Baltimore band cuts and chops with guitars and drums heavy with lead in bottom of a feet in sinking sand.

The bass and guitar swirl like the murk in a glass of water dipped from the gutter. It’s a celebratory song for something crashing. The sound of a dart being thrown at a target between the hand that threw it, and when it picks a place to stick.

Powerwasher sound like the frothing, foaming overflow of poisonous bubbles released from the bog. It’s a thickening like a recipe that keeps gaining, until the song relents.

Everyone should keep an eye on Powerwasher this year.

(Strange View)

At this point, if you’re a Small Albums Head and don’t know the record label Raso., it’s time to know about Raso.

Based in Madrid, the output of this label continually explores and explores sounds and projects worthy of repeated listens, but the volume of releases keeps us, as Raso. Heads, trying to keep up!

This single from Herminia Loh Moreno under the moniker “restinga,” skips into frame, sample and beat in tow, with a voice right through the center of the sound to ground the next moments of tests in pace subtly.

The beat bumps around like a ghost going through a closet, looking for something hidden in a top shelf shoebox.

The starts and stops of the beat under synthesized moon beams, keeps this less than 3 minutes to one of the more intriguing pattern building exercises as Moreno sings an apathetic dirge about the directive title, “Don’t Be Like That, under the guise of apathetic statements overflowing like a backed up sink drain of food coloring rising back to the silver surface.

A worthy 2:48 to listen to 100 times.

(Raso.)

There’s a whole stack of lineage and support behind The Rocky Valentines that we could reference to entice you to listen. That Martin last name has a connection to a Jason Martin you might recognize. The credits of people that work alongside Charles Martin, the brains behind The Rocky Valentines, might really resonate with a certain section of music listeners.

The thing is, The Rocky Valentines don’t need the accomplishments of anyone else to help boost the obvious skill and songwriting gift Martin has all alone.

As seen on previous releases, The Rocky Valentines hold a sustainable ability to only write songs that sound exceptionally good. Sure, the catalogue isn’t super expansive just yet, but every single song has been a hit.

Here we have the first single in announcing The Rocky Valentines’s debut album, “Erase.” This is news we at Small Albums have been waiting for since we first heard “Off and On,” back in 2022.

Charles Martin plays the majority of the instruments, while also mapping an introspective view of reality for everyone else. With guitars continuously strumming and pressing forward for the couple of minutes we have with, “Sing The Song,” grow in height as Martin continues a depth of observation, delivered in the simplicity of singing something like, “People seem / seem kind of lonely.”

Martin utilizes the directive of making a single path for the song to work within, and perfects each second without having to incorporate more and more to try to keep the listener. It’s a straight-forward approach to crafting a song, and that’s all that’s needed. Other than help with the bass, all of this song comes together with Martin playing and connecting all of the sound and parts together. Singing the melody, picking those same notes out of that long-toned guitar, it’s all weaving from the same hands.

There’s a strange, mixed up freedom in the music of The Rocky Valentines. It’s a recognition of growing up, reckoning with the realities of birthdays creeping up, encouraging yourself forward, seeing the emptiness in others, all swirled under the big sound of just playing music.

Maybe that line about loneliness is a reference to being this good at creating a song like this, mostly on your own. Looking around and recognizing what’s unfolding, and there’s nowhere else to lean on. Just keep strumming the song.

(Velvet Blue/Tooth and Nail)

To this point, Los Angeles’s Runnner releases bridge sized albums with banjo and guitar strums and the reverberation of an argument catching in a tea cup on the table. One of my all-time favorite songs is Runnner’s 2021 track, “Awash,” which stirs like an endless weather pattern that never lifts or dissipates.

Noah Weinman, the mind behind Runnner, drafts words together that illuminate common moments into strikes of electricity in the way a person never forgets touching a barbed wire fence. There’s something in Weinman’s understanding of events and scenes that tangibly drips from past records and songs with a fang in lyrics, and a melody that scatters like seeds across the brain growing patterns that can’t be uprooted.

So what would Weinman do with such a strong catalogue in understanding songwriting to this point? Release a twelve song album without words sung. Massive patches of synthesized sounds moving together like clouds being built with nail and white sheets in the attic of an abandoned house.

The textures and calibration of these brief waves of sound flow easily like notching into a maple tree and watching the syrup drizzle into a plastic bucket.

Each track is simply numbered to correspond with where it lands in the sequencing of the album. There’s nothing to hint towards what these passages are about, so the open opportunity to listen and feel swings wide. Listen from “Three” to “Four.” “Three,” bends time into a slow study, like watching tea steep in a clear mug. The long fingers of expansion in the dried leaves lingering like reddish turning before the entire glass is that red. “Four,” hangs in the same balance for a moment, before a drumbeat calls out like a newspaper headline from a few decades back.

Across this entire album, Weinman isn’t interested in making noise and sounds, but in the creation of postage stamp art on the corners of history, with eyes looking ahead. This album proves Weinman’s depth of musical understanding and abilities by turning away from anything familiar into a new room with a fresh spring of water to draw from.

(Run For Cover)

If you’ve been a part of following Small Albums for more than 3 days, you most likely know that we are Teenage Tom Petties super fans. Teenage Tom Petties is the most excellent project of Tom Brown, one half of Rural France. Notice back on Rural France’s 2021 great album “RF,” the title of song 2, “Teenage Tom Petty.” This is some kind of hyperloop, multiverse of music that should be far more popular than it is.

Ok so now that we’ve established this world you HAVE TO get involved in listening to, welcome back Rural France!

Tom Brown and Rob Fawkes, open their plastic, yellow lunchbox, where these songs originate in small segmented squares with a keyboard line shaking a little, like a branch on a tree that’s about to become a stick. Of course, some guitars that sound like the long carpet in your aunt’s house that hasn’t been vacuumed in a few months, are strumming and searing. Drums crash as thin as a toy boat moved by real waves against real rocks. The trick to this new track is the louder you listen to it, the more you get out of it.

Brown sings with a squint in the eyes that won’t allow any word to slip by as filler. It’s an easy meal, with a spice somewhere mixed in that you’ll notice after the bites are down. Fast food sandwiches on a shining plate.

Like panning for gold, Rural France shake the sifters in shin deep water, stirring the sound they’re bashing out until every bit of precious metal and gem rise to the surface. Musical sluice boxes collecting the needed materials, that all just happen to hold a value far beyond a few words and strums.

Rural France is back, it’s your turn to catch up, and get into this. The gold bits are everywhere already.

(Meritorio Records)

Swirling, the clouds and weather formations across the rounded sides of a planet, from far off. Looking at the dense thicket of cloud and atmosphere converging into a mask for the lands and possible seas below.

Ryosuke Nagaoka, a guitarist and vocalist combines analogue creation with aus, a producer gutting extraterrestrial living rooms and fish, for the innards of sounds that can wrap around strings and vocal cords in an inescapable depth.

From the initial ghost whistles of “Made-Up Mind,” there’s something hovering that will never land. Listen for the single piano strike around 25 seconds for just how intricate the production will glisten.

Moving from the first, wordless track, Nagaoka leans over the bridge of sounds and pastes vocals in ways that pivot to pastures with real sheep. Guitar strings move around like fences being placed around certain lakes and drains. It’s wide open as aus cements structures along the sides of everything in long tones and beating shapes.

These 6 songs set out to incur wide swatches of space around everything with the purpose of allowing the songs to meander into quiet acoustic melodies, all the way to landscapes of synthesized fabric covering from fictional seas to mountains with unending cliffs upward.

It’s a listen that will continue in new sounds, chiming modes, and forever turns of sound into new sound and back again.

(FLAU)

The concept of “Pronoia,” works in opposition to “Paranoia.”

Where the paranoid spend time looking over a shoulder, or suspecting the worst of strangers and family alike, people experiencing pronoia have the belief and expectation that everyone is FOR them, and has their best interests in mind.

Christian Gunning, the Seattle based creator behind the Shelf Nunny moniker, captures the glimmering edges of clean water, the perfumed airs of giant spaces, and the uplift of simply even breathing in the sounds that meld into this album.

The turns and shifts sound more like an expectant start to a sunrise, than a late night fear storm of who, and what, is lurking and watching.

In this landscape there are no security cameras, no private investigators. It’s a world built from clouds stretching into continents, and jet streams swirling into new planets.

From the onset of “dnt L3@v3 m3,” there’s an expectation in the development of the introductory moments that feels like something hopeful is surrounding an otherwise obvious plea to not be left in isolation.

As “Pronoia,” samples and stutters, glides and stalls, Gunning controls the temperature and the temptation to maximize moments that instead work in perfected harmonies of delivering uniquely crafted beats, and endless sounds, without losing any tiny piece.

“I Drove Past Our Old House Last Night,” skitters under the surface tension with unidentifiably recognizable sounds, while phantom synthesizers gently whir in and out of focus. The closing conversation, something about an anxiety attack, breaks up like a lunar transmission, and then echoes away into the gaps between seats in a comfortable room.

The utilization of vocal samples moves more like expanding lungs, than codes and formulas. Gunning has a grasp on the world these songs entertain and encapsulate, and everything feels right in place, a synthetic ecosystem with real air and eyes and mandibles.

The fusion of mode between the songs allows for stops and starts as unique parts of a whole, but working together in a continual congruence. Like a chain of waterfalls feeding one into the other until the last lake laps it all into cooling pools.

Title track, “Pronoia,” steps like golden stairs into a sky full of muted pastels. A place to leave troubles, and discover every step higher as simply just that, a moment away, and freer, to hear and look around.

Within the 11 tracks, each designated, time-coded creation holds enough for big listens and places to recognize, or go back and rewind, for all that’s stacking into these melodies and trails.

Even on, “All The Bad Things,” in this world, the underlying keyboard work gives off an inch of suspecting something still alive and breathing.

“Pronoia,” could perfectly soundtrack an opportunity to go for a hike, up a mountain and away, or simply through a computer monitor, where anything could be animated into the frames, and the path could lead to places and worlds otherwise non-existent.

In a brilliant move, in the new year of 2024, Caleb Cordes has released, “Attack,” a single from a forthcoming Sinai Vessel album(!), by a Mediafire download. Taking the moment and a half to download the files, and look through what’s included, is entirely worth it, because the song and included elements are exact, perfected, aching. Stretched like the last lap of moonlight before a cloudy dawn takes over.

Caleb Cordes, Sinai Vessel’s real life moniker, sings like the brokenness of melted sugar spread out on a sheet pan, cracked. There’s a timid pain that cuts the throat like a mountain lion finishing the night’s work. Starting with the line, “I can’t look straight at it,” the song meanders through slow work and thoughtful tool marks, until time runs out.

With field recordings from Garden of the Gods, Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and Moab, the humming and whirling of creatures unaware of the strum of strings lassoing the natural sounds into something like a ghost hand, layers scarves and coats into the threads of tree bark.

With the long game ahead, the first 5 minutes and 15 seconds whisper by like the darkness of a flashlight running out of batteries, and just the light of fainting stars dripping through long branches, make anything in the terrain more aware.

Then a boiling grumble bubbles into the picture with drums to let the uncertainty of a beating heart tumble into a cliffside plunge before resting down in the dark again.

It’s another page in Cordes continual novel of songs that play between the frailty of pressed flower petals, and the white hot exchange of recognizing places in reality without a way to cut them into something tangible.

Haze hangs like summer heat, but visibly makes wicked waves in between the back of the house and the shed. A burning orange, an amber, like a glass fizzing until it shatters.

With one of the greatest current band names, So Totally unleashes a stream of sound on this new single that plays more like textures in a closet of folded material than singular noises.

The burning in the underbelly of the song continues like a never-ending fire. Swirling and spinning like a moon around a planet that’s spinning around a star that’s spinning around a centralized black hole holding the gravity of a solar system working against itself.

The low-end plods like trains navigating tunnels under the table. Food and cutlery bouncing with the grating of metal sliding away. Guitar notes flicker like steel stars through lighter flames. And the vocals, float somewhere in the center of a day, a sudden spot of clouds that bring a drizzle that paints the afternoon in streaks of aging melon gray.

Halfway through the song, the band nearly pauses as a buried sample sounds to be fired off, someone crying out, calling for help, or assistance, or in agony. And it melts back under the dust clouds rising, as So Totally cools the song, a kettle on a counter. But the growing under the quiet picks up in granular increments until the howl and power return to sail the song off onto a shadowed trail that leads over a pale hill with no ending.

This song utilizes the viscous layers of guitars along with the steadiness of rhythms to create an endurance through subtle changes that keep the force and pressure of weather systems while also blinking like an antique lamp with a loosening wire.

A song to drift a continent into another. A song to watch a glacier become an avalanche. A song to stare into an empty field until a vulture swoops.

(Tiny Engines)

If multiple box shaped televisions, stacked in rows at the end of the hallway all playing different candy colored shows at once, with full volumes blasting, you’ve arrived here.

Sunglow returns with another chain of collected items sampled and splattered across the keys of keyboards, and wrinkles of brains.

From the busy insects driving Uhauls of “Garden Blue,” to the panicked howling of technological owls of “infoScope,” to the fleeting weather systems of “Doberman Pinscher,” every song works like Jell-O rain tumbling up and down panes of glass floating through time.

Sunglow delivers music and song like putting picked flower petals back on the center, but mixing the colors and shapes to create new plants. It’s a zoo of animals mismatched in ears and hooves, to make new 2-dimensional creatures inside of 4-dimensional googles.

Something that is extremely cool is when a band names a song the same name as their band. It’s even cooler when the band names their EP the same name as their band name, and the EP has a song on it, with the same name as the band AND the EP. Presenting this exact situation, where you can listen to the song “TVXP,” on the new EP “TVXP” by the band TVXP. But there is something even deeper about this:

Imagine a Venn diagram where the two circles coming together are two extremely great bands individually, that did the whole world a giant favor and decided to collaborate on a “center of the diagram” project, and you have TXVP.

Uniting in their home state of Washington, individual bands TV Star and Spiral XP collide on four tracks that strum and gently thrash for a few minutes. Vocals span from the gutter to the clouds in quick arrangements, duetting through the gates of guitars building rooms and walls covered in thick, hazy texture. Spiral XP’s, Max Keyes sings like a riverbed at night, while TV Star’s, Ashlyn Nagel, lifts vocals up into the leaves hanging over the dried-out dirt where the river was.

These two bands coming together carry an easy unity in strumming through drums pacing the group from one place to the next. It doesn’t feel like a massive stretch to draw something new with these musicians combining talents, as much as it feels like a wider room for their sound to exist, together. When Keyes and Nagel weave their voices on “Space Person,” it’s a quick entry point only followed by guitars mixed so loud, it jars the song forward like a great animal ending a wall’s opportunity to stand.

There’s a subtly to the sounds and fury under the surface of the vocals that creates a great distance in scape and opportunity that stretches the sound like a blinking tower from the ground up through the atmosphere. A massive needle driving to outer space.

The EP begins with immediate drums stabbing with tambourine sheen, as a guitar somewhere in the background slides around, ice shifting in sunlight. “Winter Snow,” introduces the EP, but hides the gems of the whole of what the sound grows to become by the final, title/band name track. It’s a quick slosh, that really sounds like boots in melting snow.

“Maida” froths and fizzes under the curtains of electric strain, as Keyes and Nagel debut the real sensibility of the connection between the two vocal styles that work so well together.

Final track “TVXP,” a signature from the band, compiles all that has happened on the progression of this EP and finishes the project with Nagel leading the way, singing through the growing fog.

Also shout out to the perfectly arranged basslines that casually drive these songs without making a big deal about it.

Altogether this EP is one of the best we have heard this year, and TVXP needs to become its own band, but we can’t lose TV Star or Spiral XP.

Of course two days into 2024, Really Rad Records leapt from the echoes of the endless annoyance of very online conversations about what actually defines “Emo,” in every person’s twitter opinion, to nauseating and mind numbing effects, by releasing a trio split with this title.

Beyond the genius of cover art of houses, and a name to upset people that take this all far too seriously, we have three excelling bands all offering up two songs worthy of immediate listens.

Portland’s, Swiss Army Wife, drops two songs wriggling like an aggravated animal with a foot in a trap. “What Nietzsche Wanted” and “Raccoon Eyes,” spend the time between guitars spinning notes like threads of gold, with vocals peaking like mountain ranges slicing clouds into confetti, never allowing a weather pattern to form.

Montreal’s, Avec Plaisir, speeds through the shortest song, on the album, “Untitled 02,” like a strike of lightning in a striped shirt. “Jet Lag,” pounds along slower and bending like heavy branches carrying overnight snow. The swirl of guitars midway through buries the beginning and continues to form into a wave that never crashes, but stands taller than anyone ever expected.

Phoenix, Arizona’s, Celebration Guns, closes out the triple split with a crowd of voices calling out from corners of basement rooms, over a river of guitar work. With their trademark abilities to collect pieces into songs that click into place immediately, Celebration Guns brings two more that work in the same template. Drums working alongside the complications of guitar notes, melodies hooking and holding, a perfect finish to a split far too good to be offered up this early in the year.

(Really Rad Records)

The Umbrellas have the market cornered on creating melodies that cannot be left. Like a perfectly crafted meal set on the counter, everyone gathers. The hooks and parallel lines of both voices singing up and along a ridge on the coastline trade off in ways that make each song on this new album undeniably approachable, like an arbor full of vines baring immense fruit. Grapes and leaves basking in the gleam of a sun that won’t set at 6 PM.

The guitars scurry around like creatures in a line of afternoon trees. Drums bash but never injure. The Umbrellas are the bright spot on a windshield that moves like a fingernail of light up and down no matter the bridge or spinning highway ahead.

Start this album on any song, even at any minute of any song, and there’s no test to find an entry point, always immediate, always works, always sounds like an A+ on a reading test.

The Umbrellas can’t seem to find a way to falter, just continue on through meadows of everything being TOO alive, and carrying on with baskets and shining shoes again and again.

Over the course of 2023, Chicago’s Varsity, began writing, recording and releasing one song a month from January to December. A practice in creating in the moments, to a completed concept. December finished with, “Souvenirs,” one of the best songs we heard within 2023, though only a few days remained in the year, and our best tracks list had already been published.

The aesthetic of the slow-drip, roll out of every song on this now, new, completed album, in filtered, muted images of items, culminated in the album cover of “Souvenirs,” containing every piece of the pictures from the singles.

Thinking of each song being started and completed within each month, with a knick knack at the helm of designating the description, only to all rejoin in the new year as one image, is a perfected picture of how this album sounds as a piece.

This clever roll out created the concept of the souvenir for the listener, in the sense that following the journey of releasing every track individually, becomes a collection of pieces to mark the moments of now hearing the entirety of the album together. Each song, its own month of work, and focus, chaining together to a fully developed movement.

Varsity, a 5-piece, leans heavy on creating a swath of thinning clouds that lift with golden edged glow. Something airy enough to loft even the most sincere or dark turn. The spoken piece, in “Reference Point,” with pitter patter guitar, doesn’t close the closet door completely, just leaks out the concern of what can unfold in the mind, before the drums lift everything back to a hopeful pace, but with vocalist Stephanie Smith’s voice now demanding answers as synthesizer waves rise to an unanswered ending.

For a project that passed month to month, Varsity’s consistency in sound and feel never became lost, or too stretched in the name of this experimental approach to an album’s creation. Guitars tipping a cap in desert warble, drums driving like a tiny car in a city of semi trucks. Exceptional bass lines burrowed under the synth washes, and vocals traversing walking paths into the sky. Everything intertwining inside of a single cube of soft glass.

“Black Ice,” with the hum of a bee’s wings straining under the cheerful strums and easy drums, paints the undertow of what can’t fully be grasped as Smith repeats, “I always miss you,” again and again.

The crispness of Varsity’s sound, fresh as a bowl of picked fruit, rings and chimes throughout every song in a way, that can easily be accessed, while challenging the listener to listen for the miniature sounds and moments sprinkling like summer rains as the sun continues to shine.

The practice of creating a song to be released as a single, for every song, works for Varsity, as there is no filler on this album. This is the author that creates a series of books, but keeps a narrative within each individual book to stand alone as a completed narrative. It’s a series of movies, but you can watch the third one first, and still enjoy it as a stand -alone work.

Every song is an entry point that will make the discovery of an entirety of an album all the more exciting because of the quality of these songs.

“Head In The Clouds,” a more dialed down guitar puzzle, steeps like leaves in warm water, but the melodies and strings plucking hold the place, without losing momentum.

Looking back at the release schedule of these songs as singles, the first (Done With Bits), and last (Cowboy Killer) now on the album, were released back-to-back in January and February of last year, and as the album plays together, the sequencing of the songs works solidly, like a line of painted bricks in a patterned path. The vision for this creation lands in completion. “Without You,” picks up so perfectly from where “Head In The Clouds,” trails off, but it doesn’t feel reactionary, or trying.

To truly understand this album, is to look at every corresponding image of each song as a single, listen to the fully created album, with all of the images together. Recognize Varsity’s work in genuinely pursuing the creation of an album, and not just to bash out 12 songs, and record and release them. The painstaking work of slowly pacing last year for the goal of what’s now been presented here was worth the patient creation.

Finishing the album with December’s “Souvenirs,” (THAT MASSIVE CHORUS!), right into February’s “Cowboy Killer,” shows a snapshot of just how well this all was going to work from the beginning.

This album will be one we continue talking about for the rest of 2024.