Let’s face it: when it comes to music’s power to communicate feelings of intense loneliness and deep bewilderment, “instrumental” shit just doesn’t hold a candle songs with some intelligible and SAD AF goddamn WORDS in them. I mean: I don’t care how achingly, hauntingly beautiful the melody is; nothing “communicates” like vocals do.
Sacred Bones Records’ newest signing Hilary Woods seems to understand this, as her forthcoming debut album, Colt, is chock-full of those same sorts of of lugubrious, claustrophobic, and spookily one-of-a-kind vocal melodies that made the likes of Julee Cruise famous (read: “famous.”)
Following the release of her first two EPs, Woods reportedly spent the majority of last year “writing and recording songs on an eight-track in an abandoned flat […] layering piano, synth, tape machine, field recordings, vocals, drone, unadorned beats, and old string instruments.” The resultant LP straddles the line between acoustic, singer/songwriter balladry and deep space, electronic dreamscapes, but its woozy vocals, with lyrics detailing Woods’ “intensely personal journey through grief, abandonment, and mutating love,” are always front and center.
To get an audio-visual taste of all this, check out the video for the album’s latest single “Prodigal Dog” down below, for which Woods “set out to make a video that was slightly claustrophobic, cyclical, predominantly black in colour, one that traced the internal feeling from where the song was written.”
Colt is out June 8 on Sacred Bones, and you can pre-order it now by clicking on these indispensable words right here.
Colt tracklisting:
01. Inhaler
02. Prodigal Dog
03. Take Him In
04. Kith
05. Jesus Said
06. Sever
07. Black Rainbow
08. Limbs
More about: Hilary Woods
