Although now based out of New York, Taylor Pearlstein’s roots are from somewhere altogether less urban. Taylor grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, a place of, “sleepy, Lynchian small-town mountains” in Washington state, and that sense of uneasy rural idyl seems to run through her music, like a river flowing from a mountain. Since first appearing back in 2019, Taylor has released a number of singles introducing listeners to her imagery-led storytelling and aching indie-folk. With her debut EP, Perfect Blue, set to arrive later this Autumn, today Taylor is premiering the latest offering from it, her new single Back Away.

Back Away is a song of spiralling isolation, while the lyrics never actually find Taylor leaving her bedroom, the track seems to warp and distort way beyond that. The nearly six-minute runtime takes us as listeners from the intro of muted acoustics to a saturated crescendo of fizzing anarchic electric guitars and wailing buzzsaw strings, as the song’s title seems to shift from a request to a threat, “back away, back away”. From there gradually the strings seem to come into sharper focus, resolving to an ornate instrumental section before dipping out entirely, to leave Taylor and her guitar to take the whole thing home.

Existing somewhere in the middle ground of the orchestral folk of Weyes Blood and the emotional heft of Mitski, Taylor Pearlstein is an artist with seemingly no end to her musical ambition. While the cinematic quality is writ large, there’s also a sense of something very human, of how our instincts and desires can take us down a difficult path, and how in pursuit of the Perfect Blue, we might just end up in the dark.

Perfect Blue is out later this year. For more information on Taylor Pearlstein visit https://taypearlstein.com/