Woodhouse Interviews Nathan Stevens

Ambient and drone do not have to be calm.

In fact, C. Diab would prefer you to be overwhelmed. Not out of any sense of maliciousness, but on his newest album, Imerro, the flooding textures, bursts of horns and hypnotic passages are all created to craft ascension through stimulation. We talked with him below.

I went to two memorials that weekend.

I scattered my grandmother’s ashes in a bluebonnet patch and napped in bluebonnets myself before I consoled my step-brother after his mother passed. It weighed on me through the month—but was briefly lifted and crushed by Frail Body. At SXSW, just before the release of their new album, Artificial Bouquet, Frail Body ripped through the record. An unyielding exploration of grief, lead singer and guitarist Lowell Shaffer relives the loss of his own mother through the single most cathartic album made this year. We talked to them below.

There’s a train waiting for you.

No clue where it’ll take you, how long the journey will be—but the train is there for you. And Minhwi Lee is your guide. The South Korean singer-songwriter reaches into a deep well of beauty and melancholy on her album 미래의 고향 Hometown to Come, reflecting Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez. Lee is searching for community, for home, in an ever changing world. We spoke with her below.

Existentialism usually isn’t this catchy.

Nor are songs about Virginia Woolf, black holes and the process of the body destroying itself to create a new form. But Sofia Freire finds and tempers the horror and wonder of each subject with aplomb. The Brazilian multi-instrumentalist has made one of the finest progressive pop albums in recent memory on Ponta Da Lingua. And we talked with her below.

The end of the world is bigger than love. But only by a little.

acloudyskye took the outsized sound, low end and emotions of EDM and, in his newest album, has paired them with scintillating indie-rock. The choruses rise to the rafters, even as the narrative of There Must Be Something Here descends into a post-apocalyptic world tinged with heartbreak. We chatted with Skye below.

We are haunted.

By what? We’re not supposed to know. Our past, our uncertain futures, ghosts of dead possibilities—all swirling in the background. Knoll summons but doesn’t exorcise them, it exercises them. The vicious Tennessee outfit engages in a fusion of metal styles that borders on outright warfare. The pitched sorrow of doom, the lacerating speed of grind and the drama of black metal all combine in their newest As Spoken. And we spoke to them below.