ICYMI
A somewhat late roundup of music you may or may not have heard yet
It’s been a minute, but the world unsurprisingly did not stop turning. In and around the hundred or so rotations since my last stack, there have been some really exceptional releases, and the following are just a few.
Red Sky at Morning by h. pruz, released in November 2025 (Mountain Laurel Recording) is at the top of my list for exciting new music out there. It is a haunting collection of bright shiny objects that all at once thrill you and scare you with a measure of alchemy turning light to darkness and vice versa almost constantly throughout the album. Is this beautiful or terrifying? Joy or sadness? Eventually it’s just easier to relent, acquiescing to the innate duality of it all.
With production, engineering and collaboration by Felix Walworth (Told Slant, Florist) as well as an ample lineup of other brilliant musicians, Red Sky at Morning was recorded over a month spent ruminating and exploring delicate sonic architectures at a forested home in upstate NY. The album is a cat’s cradle of simple threads that form complex patterns, simultaneously deconstructing and building in an almost cellular way. At once I find myself silently eulogizing the minimalism yet wondering just how many instruments I’m hearing; sounds woven together in ways completely natural yet somehow uniquely novel. Sweet, minimal arpeggios layered over each other backed with piano, organ, ambient guitars, synth (Buchla Music Easel, Emily Sprague!), spoken word, and much more provide a lush landscape of spellbinding sound.
Adding dimension to the project, Hannah has released a solo rpg module, A Sailor’s Warning, to accompany the album. Such a simple and low-tech accoutrement, yet it makes the whole so much greater than the sum of its parts.
The music video for one of my personal favorite tracks, Arrival, provides near-perfect companion visuals to the song with a sublime color palette and a production quality that gives an inexplicable sense of nostalgia.
Prewn (Izzy Hagerup) is at it again, with her steamrolling beast of a record, System (Exploding in Sound Records). She’s taken her tormented-yet-endearing vocal stylings to another level, and the orchestration, cohesiveness and arrangement of the album give it an atmosphere reminiscent of a haunted children’s book fairy tale, if you could turn that into music. Creepy, careful marionette-puppeteer-like rhythms give way to ass-kicking, chugging guitars backed with warping, distant vocal harmonies and seamless cello and string sections that will undoubtedly haunt your headspace well after the album ends.
The music video for the title track ‘System’ puts you squarely into a colorless yet evocative story strung together with compelling imagery that seems to lack a time and a place.
A little further back in late May of 2025, the UK eight piece sonic experiment Caroline released their second (self-titled) full length album, Caroline 2 (deluxe edition released in November - purchase on Bandcamp) on Rough Trade Records.
My immediate reaction to the first single off of this record, Total Euphoria, was that someone had perhaps accidentally torn the fabric of the time-space continuum. It’s like a mind-altering riddle of sound that keeps giving you chances to solve it, but the solution ultimately evades you, disappearing just around the next corner. Bursts of guitar, drums, vocals and horns appear out of nowhere and resurface in a kaleidoscopic swirl with an endlessly moving vanishing point.
Only a few albums have slapped me across the face like this one, with its super unconventional and non-linear auditory offerings. Maybe it’s moving and you’re not, like when the car next to you backs up slightly and you instinctively lurch for the brake pedal. Was that voice you just heard from in front of you or behind you? Caroline 2 shamelessly throws playful curveballs at you, occasionally landing on a point of reunion, but not for long. At times meditative, at times grandiose, the album is a wakeup call to remind us that avant-garde is still a thing. Give it a whirl, you will not be disappointed.
The music video for Total Euphoria perhaps confirms my theory about the time-space continuum thing, with a strange dichotomy of worlds existing at the same time… Or maybe there’s just a glitch in the matrix.