In the lead-up to Temple Songs, Laura Veirs shared a video, for the jazzy folk earworm “Pulse,” in which she was cream-pied in the face, got showered in a hail of silly string, and—after a good and proper warm-up—deadlifted 110 pounds. Those are just a few of many herculean feats that went into the Found Light follow-up. Veirs wrote, recorded, arranged, produced, and performed the album herself, across three months in her backyard studio, using only acoustic instruments. (The one exception is saxophone by a secret special guest.) “I needed to make this album to connect more deeply with my taste, aesthetics, and confidence,” she says in press materials. “Eventually I found a flow—seeing the studio again, for the first time since my 20s, as a private place for exploration.”
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Hovvdy: Big World [Arts & Crafts]
In the nine years since their debut album, Taster, the typical Hovvdy song has evolved from a slowcore curio to a sort of waterlogged, would-be pop hit, increasingly irresistible but still transmitted like a secret broadcast to buried-treasure hunters. Big World invites you to keep digging: Foggy indie-pop earworms like “Blast” and “Try Try Try” seem precision-tooled not to be unforgettable but tantalisingly half-remembered, while the ballads use effortless, meandering melodies that would otherwise scan as Grammy bait to draw you deeper into their ineffable ambient textures.
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Everything Is Recorded: Cut Off Your Nose [XL]
