When Skullcrusher (Helen Ballentine) emerged from the LA indie scene, she immediately stood apart for her ethereal blend of folk and ambient textures. Poised to solidify her distinct voice, her new album ‘And Your Song is Like a Circle’ invites listeners into her meditative process of creative surrender, memory, and transformation.
After years spent carving a place in Los Angeles, she returned to her Hudson Valley roots, a move that shaped the introspective feel of her new work. This lateral move became fertile ground for songwriting, allowing Ballentine to reflect on being caught between places, both physical and psychological.
Her decision to record part of the album at home imbues the music with a quiet vulnerability, while sessions with Aaron Paul O’Brien in Los Angeles and co-producer Isaac Eiger in New York add depth and dimension. This marks an evolution from the insular world of her 2022 debut album, ‘Quiet the Room’, toward a soundscape that swirls between memory and landscape, searching yet grounded.
‘And Your Song is Like a Circle’ is as much a meditation on the act of creation as it is on emotion and narrative. The lush single ‘Exhale’ embodies an acceptance of impermanence that is not just personal, but structural. Ballentine plays with recording techniques, sketching in the liminal spaces where definitions drift and genres dissolve.
Her move to Dirty Hit Records, home to boundary-pushing acts like ‘The 1975’, expands her reach and cements her place as a transatlantic innovator at the forefront of alt-folk’s evolving landscape. By pairing crystalline electronics with traditional folk forms, she makes room for voices and perspectives often pushed to the genre’s periphery.
The album’s title encapsulates an circular outlook on artistic growth: never perfectly round, always approximate, yet suggestive of unity and completion. The path may wobble and drift, but a shape emerges through effort and return. What counts is the act of trying.
The sequence of songs traces a gentle gravitational pull, where meaning isn’t seized but slowly orbited—resonating in tone, space, and emotional weight throughout the record.
What sets Skullcrusher apart is neither grand concept nor technical virtuosity, but the gentle, persistent pressure of meaning-making, the willingness to approach the unsayable through repetition and patience.