SKULLCRUSHER SHARES NEW SINGLE “LIVING” + LIVE PERFORMANCE
Skullcrusher recently announced her highly anticipated new album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, due out October 17th via her new label home Dirty Hit. Today, Helen Ballentine has shared the album’s final preview, the lush and harmony-laden “Living.” She shares, “One day I was wandering around Brooklyn and I felt like I was watching everything through a window or on a screen. I felt like everyone was moving so fluidly and certainly like moving through a piece of choreography. Living is about being a voyeur, catching a glimpse of brief moments of people’s lives. Like watching a play through a small peep hole, or through the slit of a curtain. I wonder if I am the same. If my life feels a part of this production or if it exists in a small detail somewhere off stage.”
Next week, Skullcrusher will host an intimate New York headline performance at Night Club 101 on Oct 6th. Tickets available HERE.
Recorded over a period of years following the release of her celebrated 2022 debut, Quiet the Room, And Your Song is Like a Circle does not capture experience – it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable. Swaying between elegant folk and crystalline electronics, landing somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as what’s been lost.
Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she’d called home for nearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New York’s Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised, leaving her chosen family to return to her blood family.
Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks. If Skullcrusher’s first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domestic space, Circle finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes.
Lead single “Exhale” is built around gorgeous vocal filigrees that fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. Watch the video for “Exhale” below, which was conceptualised by Ballentine in collaboration with director Adam Alonzo and shot in Upstate New York in and around her mother’s house. Opening track “March,” is a stark piano reverie laced with flickering electronics and ambient layers. Watch an intimate, stripped back performance of the heartwrenching song HERE. Third single “Dragon” is a gorgeous, murky pop song that lets piano echo over tight, gritted percussion.
Read more about the record in Ballentine’s profile with The FADER, who said her “skill as a songwriter is adding gravitas to the most conceptual of ideas or, as she does on the album’s meta first single “Exhale,” pull into focus the act of writing a song in the first place.”
