Further Listening HERE

5. Time Travel Is No Problem For Lily Seabird

Hailing from Vermont, Lily Seabird has found a growing audience in recent years, releasing a record a year on the always fabulous Lame-O Records. Following up on last year’s Trash Mountain, a record inspired by friendship and place, Lily approaches her new record, Lightsphere On Their Way, with a search for something more universal, exploring ideas of, “mortality and reverence for the innately human”. Within that, she also leans into something almost magical: the titular lightspheres, “a catalysing presence or force that visits time and time again and shifts stories, feelings and trajectories”, the subtle way our life is changed by things outside of our own control and understanding. Ahead of the album’s September release, this week Lily shared the latest single from it, Portals To The Past.

One of the record’s key themes is the passage of time, “our perception as it rolls forward, as the past gets further away and the future rolls out infinitely ahead of us”, and it’s certainly present here on Portals To The Past, a song that, “came from a longer poem I wrote after waking from a vivid dream on a friend’s porch in New Orleans”. The song explores the idea of letting yourself linger too long in past experiences, as Lily explains, “dwelling too much can sometimes create what feels like a portal and bring you right back to where you once were, that’s the portal to the past”. If the song is about feeling like you’re stuck in the past, then musically it suggests a bright future, Lily channelling every bit of Neil Young-like clatter into her ornate folk-rock setting, living up to her claim that, “the most emotional parts of the record are instrumental”, as she and collaborator Rick Soszynski let the guitars wail and fuzz. There’s an intriguing dichotomy at the heart of Portals To The Past, while Lily’s mind is racing down a thousand timelines, her body is stuck in a swamp of inertia, “sometimes you can’t go back, so you just look out the window, and I just sit and stare”. Ultimately, perhaps you can’t escape your past, only learn to leave it where it lies, stop looking for the portal and embrace whatever is coming next.

Lightspheres On Their Way is out September 4th via Lame-O Records. For more information on Lily Seabird visit https://lilyseabird.com/

4. Captain Tallen And The Benevolent Entities Are So Hot Right Now

A vehicle for the songwriting of Brooklyn-based poet-for-hire, vocalist and cellist Tallen Gabriel, Captain Tallen & The Benevolent Entities found their name, like surely everyone should, during a cabin retreat when they, “mused about what it would be like to escape their existential woes together on a ship on the high seas”. Thankfully for us, they didn’t give it all up and sail the seven seas, and instead stuck to writing songs about, “the grappling of heartbreak, gender identity, and climate crises”, some of which form their upcoming album, Earth, Swallow Me Whole. With the album arriving in September this week, Tallen and his would-be shipmates shared the latest single from it, Heatwave.

Heatwave is a song forged while grappling with a series of crises, written when touring the Midwest during, “a blistering heatwave”, that left Tallen simultaneously worrying about paying for top surgery, pining for someone who was, “sending me mixed messages” and contemplating the planet’s fate at the hands of climate meltdown. Faced with all that dread, Tallen found two options available: “escapism and recklessness”. Fittingly for a song about a racing mind, the song has a certain ruminating quality, a sort of heat-haze blurred circularity, as Tallen’s rapid tumble of words is adorned with bright acoustic, creating a gentle urgency reminiscent of the likes of Clever Girls or Here We Go Magic. Lyrically, Tallen seems to flit rapidly between varying all-encompassing thoughts, breathlessly shifting from one intrusive thought to the next, all delivered with a typically poetic flourish. For all its struggles, Heatwave is a song that never stays still for long, and one that sets a course for Captain Tallen & The Benevolent Entities at the start of their very exciting musical journey.

Earth, Swallow Me Whole is out September 18th via Sage Records. For more information on Captain Tallen & The Benevolent Entities visit https://tallengabriel.com/.

3. Nora Stanley Is Clearly Well Red

While Nora Stanley might be a new name to you, there’s a very good chance you’ve heard her play on someone else’s records. Nora’s both a prolific collaborator with the likes of Cassandra Jenkins and The New Pornographer, and an acclaimed improviser, most notably in collaboration with Benny Bock. Those might sound like two somewhat disparate paths from a musician that’s delightfully hard to pin down; thankfully, now stepping out as a solo artist, Nora doesn’t really try to tread either of those. Her debut solo album, Glass, out later this month via Worm Records, is a record as complex and beautiful as the substance after which it is named, and this week she shared the record’s “psychic centrepiece”, Red.

At least part inspired by the writing of Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson, Red finds Nora exploring, “the strange, nonlinear ways we experience love, memory, loss, and healing”. The track is something of a masterclass in the slow build, underpinned by a cyclical acoustic guitar line. Nora’s vocals enter initially alone, comparing love to the fate of a once-thumbed paperback, “cover to cover, consume me, place back on the shelf when you’re done”. From there, she is joined by subtle flourishes of electric guitar, synth and woodwind in a series of quiet crescendos, before, like a relationship burning out, the song draws to a close: “helps with the healing, having held you with feeling, interest slows to a cold hard stop”. The whole thing has a sense of life being processed, as if Nora is singing the words out loud to make sense of them, to see how life looks on the other side of the glass and whether past feelings still belong in the present.

Glass is out July 31st via Worm Records. For more information on Nora Stanley visit https://www.norastanley.com/.

2. Babehoven Serve Up A Lasagna Even Garfield Would Be Proud Of

Babehoven, and the songwriting of Maya Bon, have been something of a constant on this site ever since I first heard their remarkably mature debut EP, Sleep, back in 2018. Now settled into their current duo form, with Maya joined by Ryan Albert, they’ve gone on to release numerous EPs and a pair of brilliant studio albums, gradually cementing a reputation as one of the American underground’s best-kept secrets. Two years on from their last record, 2024’s Water’s Here In You, the band are set to make a welcome return with the September release of I See Them, I See Me, which they previewed this week with a new single, Lasagna.

As well as the two humans involved in I See Them, I See Me, there’s also a pair of blind felines, Trilobite and Zorza, the four creatures sharing a space they all experience in different ways, a “parallax view”, that allowed Maya and Ryan, “to reorient themselves in relation to society’s increasingly warped ways of being and seeing”. In Lasagna’s case, this taps into the idea of how a new relationship forces you to be seen in a different fashion, as Maya recently told Gold Flake Paint, “sometimes when you’re deeply intertwined, you’re so close you can’t really see one another. You want the other to break in two, to reveal what’s underneath”. The track enters with fairly uncharacteristic bombast for a band as normally intricate as Babehoven, reflective of a more traditional recording process with a six-strong band recording live and a philosophy of “no playback, no headphones, and no preparation”. The result is probably Babehoven at their most raw and instantaneous, as drums clatter and big-sky guitars howl and swirl around Maya’s mesmeric vocal like Crazy Horse swapping Neil Young for Emmylou Harris. A song about what we hide and what we show, break through Lasagna’s crispy, gnarled topping and discover the equally deliciously layered substance of Babehoven lurking underneath.

I See Them I See Me is out September 18th via Double Double Whammy. For more information on Babehoven visit https://www.babehoven.com/.

1. Jake Xerxes Fussel Breathes New Life Into The Rock Island Line

The music Jake Xerxes Fussell makes a lot more sense if you know his backstory. Jake grew up in Georgia, the son of two artists and documentarians, two people infused with both a respect for the path and, “an unquenchable intellectual curiosity”. It’s perhaps with those qualities that Jake approaches folk music, a space where, “songs are their religion”, and people sit on a spectrum from, “conservative to wildly creative“, as they re-interpret them. On his latest album, The Old Beloved Paths, Jake set out to re-record songs he’s heard his entire life but expressed beneath his own lighting: “I have to relate to them personally. I approach these songs through my own worldview“.

With the album arriving in September, this week Jake shared his re-interpretation of Rock Island Line, a song he loved, but in its traditional form, “wasn’t working for me”. In a distinctly Jake Xerxes Fussell fashion, he fused it with an old English nursery rhyme, “Wire, briar, limberlock. How many geese is in our flock?” The result is Rock Island Line in a way that makes sense in Jake’s own mind, “marrying those two things, I felt like something worked, it felt like a song to me“. Recorded, like much of The Old Beloved Path, as a document of, “musicians playing live together in a room”, Jake and producer Ben Whiteley, deliberately limited what a song could be to try and hone in on its essential bones. It’s an approach that works brilliantly here on this delightfully understated number, with Jake’s half-whispered vocal tapping into the nursery rhyme feel reminiscent of early Iron & Wine. Even the percussion sounds like it doesn’t want to make too much noise, just pattering away beneath the warm bass pulse, twangy acoustic and occasional keyboard adornments. Jake Xerxes Fussell has always been an undeniably talented musician, but here, a decade plus into his career, he seems to have hit onto something truly magical. By getting back to the heart of what making music has always been about, he’s opened a world of beautiful possibilities.

The Old Beloved Path is out September 18th via Fat Possum Records. For more information on Jake Xerxes Fussell visit https://www.jakexerxesfussell.com/.

Header photo is Jake Xerxes Fussell by Paige Prather.