Woodhouse Interviews

Heavenly reverb is suddenly shattered.

Jack Tobias loves ruptures. That’s clear from his work in YHWH Nailgun, where machine gunning synths burst through previously coherent sonic thoughts. On his sol…

The names in Fragile Wings suggest softness; tenuous and brittle.

And there is desperation in “Hopeless Magic,” “Three-Headed Moth” and, of course, the album title. But the album is anything but frag…

Stockholm duo Alex Zethson and Johan Jutterström’s new album is a beautiful, minimal reflection on perfectionism and failure.

Through an intense and intimate recording process that picks up the clack …

A pyromaniac haunts Points of Origin.

John Leonard Orr, a serial arsonist who was also a fire investigator, shambles through Will Stratton’s excellent new album as a wayward grim reaper. But fire itse…

“I’m a savage/I’m a sad bitch,”

slurs Quinton Barnes. He’s more the former than the latter on CODE NOIR. The Canadian rapper blends R&B, hip-hop, house, hyperpop, and anything else that would inject h…

Supplication offers a path.

Christianity, heteronormativity, they promise a program. Follow us, do not question, and you will be rewarded. What happens when you stray?

That’s a core question behind Bat…

Ghosts litter Drinking Songs.

The damned drowned, dying soldiers, innocents packed onto a train before it explodes; there’s not a note on Drinking Songs that isn’t haunted. Released 20 years ago th…

The voice is an instrument. The voice is the narrative.

Flipping between at least four different languages, and darting across each others’ vocal ranges, Catalan duo Tarta Relena offer a confounding,…

We open by discussing an Irish goodbye vs a French exit.

The phraseology is different but the outcome is the same; “Leaving the Party Early.” The first song on Trust Fund’s excellent Has it Been A Wh…

Wrestler, rapper, world champion, pharmacist.

Ahmed, With Love. might have the strangest resume of any MC alive. The Dublin-based rapper has joined a growing throng of Irish artist embracing a color…

Can you have a pleasant haunting?

Sanje thinks so. “You can be Casper!” he says with a laugh. The lead single from his stunning debut, De Repente Otra Vez, is “Buen Fantasma,” the story of a long los…

It’s autumn, and everything has changed.

Band members come and go, songs mutate, the seasons shift. There’s an acceptance, both in title and general mood, for Clasping Hands with the Moribund, anothe…

Albums are not usually conversations.

Or if they are, they’re pretty one way. Not so for Scott Orr’s Miracle Body, a deeply comforting slice of jazz, new age, and sophisti-pop that melds together int…

Dumbasses, gimmick peddlers, conmen coned by their own bosses dot Famous Lunch.

Chris Acker isn’t depressed, he’s just disappointed. And his sighing country tunes, tasteful pedal steel and all, just…

Singing at the edge of the world.

Staring into the cold Atlantic, watching the waves crash all around, and seeing only the pale blue of the horizon must be sublime. And sublime in its original meanin…

Is “crushing joy” a thing?

That’s the only way I can describe And So I Watch You From Afar and, especially, their newest album Megafauna. There are few bands as loud as the Belfast boys, but the chor…

“I wondered lonely as a cloud.” Emphasis on lonely.

Troubadour, vagabond, carpenter, folk-singer Peter Oren broke out in 2017 with his mythological heavy Anthropocene, with themes as crushing as his …

And So I Watch You From Afar are as joyous as their name is ridiculous.

Like an energy drink being shoved into your soul. Like the world’s happiest mosh-pit. Like punching god in the face after clim…

There are glitches in the system.

And Kill Bill’s one of them. The southern rapper is a founding member of the internet label/collective EXO music, popping up in the early 2010s with his gravelly, Li…

“Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected/Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted.”

All hail the king of anxiety. Pop-punk legend Jeff Rosenstock mutated his career for the…at least third time with a …