Listening

Eisenberg’s experimental instincts haven’t gone anywhere: the melodies still take unexpected turns and the guitar work still catches you off guard, but here they’re folded into something closer to the 1970s singer-songwriter tradition. Folky, with jazzy touches. The avant-garde scaffolding of earlier records gives way to songs that breathe differently, and Eisenberg’s voice sits at the centre in a way it hasn’t quite before. The lyrics circle memory, time and youth without tipping into overt nostalgia. If you’ve bounced off their more uncompromising work in the past, this is the way in.

Many years ago someone handed me a copy of Wilderness’s self-titled album and I loved it: chanty vocals, post-punk instrumentation, a record I’ve returned to ever since. For reasons I can’t account for, I never looked into who the band were or what happened to them (they disbanded, it turns out, at the end of the aughts).

So it was a nice surprise when a friend sent me this four-track EP and it sounded immediately familiar in the right way. Vulture Feather is a Northern California trio featuring two former Wilderness members, and Craving and Aversion trades that band’s chanty restraint for something more muscular and hypnotic—post-hardcore-indebted art rock, to borrow their own framing. Colin McCann’s vocals still do that preacherly thing. The rhythms circle rather than resolve. A prompt to finally do my homework.

Hannah Pruzinsky’s work on this record is unmistakably that of a writer. They co-run a NYC music publication, and the LP shipped with a limited run of illustrated choose-your-own-adventure booklets. The songs share that sensibility: patient, considered, attentive to small pivots. Mostly hushed instrumentation—fingerpicked guitar and piano, but also Wurlitzer, sax, and synth—threaded with improvised interludes that keep the sequencing loose. The lyrics circle dependency and control without ever landing too hard on either.

The quiet gets broken twice, usefully. “if you cannot make it stop” pushes toward shoegaze: Grouper at one end of the dial, My Bloody Valentine at the other. This makes the surrounding calm feel like a choice rather than a default.

The Twilight Sad have spent twenty years working a seam between Scottish indie, goth, and shoegaze—three sounds that have drifted in and out of fashion around them. It’s The Long Goodbye is their first record in seven years, and it arrives at a moment when shoegaze has gone from a minor concern to something close to a default setting for young guitar bands. Good timing.

James Graham wrote the album while watching his mother live with early-onset dementia. I didn’t know that on first listen—I learned it later, and the lyrics rearranged themselves accordingly on the third or fourth pass. The title stops being a phrase and starts being a description.

Likely to find them their biggest audience yet, and deservedly so.

Cornfield’s first record since becoming a mother in 2023, and it sounds like the perspective shift has unlocked something. The pedal steel (courtesy of Adam Brisbin) threads through the album beautifully—country-tinged without ever tipping into full country, giving even the more vulnerable moments a warmth and sway. It’s her most collaborative album to date, and the guest list reflects good taste and good company: Buck Meek, Feist, Christian Lee Hutson. There’s something worth noting in that openness—becoming a parent seems to have made her more willing to let other voices in, both literally and in how she writes. The themes of renewal and perseverance through awkwardness land without ever feeling heavy-handed. Closer “Bloody and Alive” addresses motherhood most directly, spare and unguarded, and it earns the weight it carries. Highly recommended.

The story goes that Flea, having learned trumpet as a kid, devoted two hours each day for two years during the most recent RHCP tour to re-learning the instrument, with a commitment to recording an album at the end of it. This is it, and it’s great. Some good originals as well as covers—Nick Cave singing ‘Wichita Lineman’ isn’t something I knew I needed.