indie

Maya Hawke’s voice is imperfect and endearing. Lyrical themes flit between existential whimsy and the kind of self-examination that celebrity tends to provoke. The production keeps things warm and unfussy, which suits her. An impressive folk-pop record from someone who could easily have settled for the day job.

Across its run city of careless angels moves through bedroom folk, glitched electronics, lo-fi power pop and something close to ambient rap, which makes for an uneven listen, though it mostly keeps its charm throughout. “Fall Asleep” and “Reason” recall early Alex G a little too closely. “Imaginary Woman” skirts the same line but the composition is strong enough to carry it, and the ooh-and-aah background vocals are the best thing on the record.

Brown Horse are from Norwich, which you would never guess from Total Dive. The guitars are pure Crazy Horse and the pedal steel weeps on cue. A song called “Heart of the Country” arrives with no apparent irony. This is the modern Americana mould—the one Ovven, Ratboys, Florry, Tiberius and a dozen others are working right now, all of them tracing the same lines back through MJ Lenderman to Jason Molina, Lucinda Williams, Silver Jews, the Drive-By Truckers, Wilco, Uncle Tupelo.

The geography is the only misdirection. The other song titles (“Wreck”, “Sadness Reigns”, “Oblivion”) tell you exactly where the lyrics live, and they aren’t wrong.

The standout is “Twisters”. You could argue the record doesn’t move around much: the mood, the tempo, the instrumentation and the preoccupations hold fairly steady from start to finish. That’s a fair criticism of a less assured album. Here it isn’t one. When a band sounds this good doing one thing, the consistency reads as confidence rather than limitation, and I’m happy to sit in it for 45 minutes.

Star Moles is Emily Moales, a Philadelphia songwriter whose previous records leaned hard into knights, dragons and Arthurian legend. Highway to Hell puts all that aside: the opener spells it out (“Gone are the albums of knights and dragons / Gone are the kings and queens of Camelot”), and what’s left is the everyday, observed with a wry, slightly bewildered eye. Postmasters general, days off, parties skipped. Kevin Basko’s production at is loose in a presumably deliberate way: a flubbed intro on “The End” stays in, and stray vocal moments a tidier record would have scrubbed are left to breathe. It suits songs that sit in the same 70s Laurel Canyon folk-pop territory that you’ll have noted I keep finding myself drawn to lately—warm, melodic, hazy, but with arrangements that reward attention.

Cameron Picton’s first record outside Black Midi (a band whose shtick I never totally warmed to) and a tonal world away from Geordie Greep’s The New Sound, whose calypso pastiche left me cold. My New Band Believe is the Windmill alumnus I didn’t expect to like. Almost entirely acoustic, built from strings, woodwind, harpsichord and pianos stacked into something that keeps tilting underfoot, it has the orchestral curiosity of Van Dyke Parks without the kitsch. “Love Story” sits in the middle like a small domestic scene that won’t quite hold still. The whole thing is intriguing in a way I’m still working out, which is the better kind of intriguing.

Sean Solomon spent the better part of a decade fronting Moaning on Sub Pop before that band wound down, and went back to making animated videos for Run the Jewels and Unknown Mortal Orchestra in the quieter stretch that followed. The World Is Not Good Enough is his first solo record, on ANTI-, and it sounds like a record made by someone who took the long way round to it.

Hushed, melodic, personal; “Postcard” is the standout and “Black Hole” is the most honest: “I’m afraid if I have children / I might pass this sadness on”. Coping mechanisms, fears named rather than dodged.