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.
WATCH “LIVING” LIVE PERFORMANCE
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.”
Lyrics came into shape while doing dishes. She painted her kitchen cabinets. The months grew long. One summer, a moth infestation across Hudson kept her from leaving her building. Moths swarmed outside, and crept into her apartment. She shooed them out of her bedroom for the night. When she woke up, they were all dead. She watched a lot of movies to fill the days. “I had a really visceral experience watching David Lynch’s Inland Empire for the first time,” she says. “At the climax, I literally fell out of my chair crying. I zoomed out and saw myself from above.”
At first, she wasn’t sure the music she was composing would cohere into an LP. While making the album, Ballentine focused deeply on the evaporative nature of creative work: the way ideas can appear and dissipate, leaving only faint traces behind, the way a voice courses through a fragile point in time, the way meaning can flicker and falter between people trying their best to understand each other. She recorded at home and in friends’ studios, working alongside apob (Dora Jar, Deb Never) in Los Angeles and co-producer Isaac Eiger (The Dare, Frost Children, Cassandra Jenkins, Malice K) in New York.
While recording, Ballentine experimented with new ways of capturing her voice, such as singing with contact microphones attached to her throat, “creating these really scary sounds.” Throughout the record, the line between human and machine blurs. “The voice is my favorite instrument because everybody has it,” she adds. “It’s related to so many different kinds of sounds: crying, screaming, laughing. And it’s ephemeral. It’s going to eventually die.”
Tracklist:
01 March
02 Dragon
03 Living
04 Maelstrom
05 Changes
06 Periphery
07 Red Car
8 Exhale
09 Vessel
10 The Emptying
Some experiences never spit back what they devour. They are too dense; they wield too much gravity. The closer you get to the nucleus, the more you deform. “That kind of journey can be metaphorically applied to so many different things. It could be trying to find yourself, figure out who you really are, figure out what you believe in,” says Ballentine. “As you are journeying within the labyrinth, you have to take on a different form in order to bear witness to the energy inside. You have to become this other being in order to experience something new, and then return to yourself, or get stuck.”
“I like thinking about my work as a collection, and every time I add more to it, I’m adding a rock,” Ballentine says. “Eventually it might form a circle. Each time I make something, I’m putting another line around the body of work. It feels like I’ll be trying to trace it for my whole life.”
Imagine a hand steering a pencil around an empty space. The lines left in the graphite’s wake are not quite round, but they scratch at the idea of a perfect circle. This sketch wobbles, nearing the axis and then drifting from it. A circle’s ghost lifts from the scrawl all the same: The shape emerges from the failure to capture it. And Your Song is Like a Circle curves across that evocative failure, vibrating with the fervency of the attempt.