again, there is the stunning debut EP by Brooklyn singer-songwriter h. pruz (full name Hannah Pruzinsky). It’s a quiet, powerful record, leaving its mark not with force but with gentle turns of melody and cutting lyrics delivered softly, easily. It’s a front porch with wind chimes sounding; it’s a nap on the couch on a summer afternoon; it’s a pair of dirty hands in compost, letting dead things turn into something richer, kinder. It’s fuzzy memories overlaid on each other to form the present.

The songs took shape as Pruzinsky spent time away from their home city in more rural settings — spending time in the Carolinas, visiting her Pennsylvania hometown, hiking excursions upstate. Oftentimes their voice barely breaks a whisper, as if deferring to the quiet of the trees. Though the EP was recorded in their New York apartment, while working as a medical practitioner in two Brooklyn ERs during a pandemic, the country had sunk into the songs. References to forest-bathing and hiking, to rough back roads and gravel, to meadows and hills, are peppered into their lyrics.

She recorded remotely with Asheville-based multi-hyphenate Colin Miller (MJ Lenderman, Wednesday), exchanging demos recorded in bedrooms and closets. The sonics are intimate, down to the sounds of lips parting and pick scraping string. Though they couldn't physically work together, the two found themselves intuitively, almost psychically tuned in to the emotion and truth at the core of the songs.
https://hpruz.bandcamp.com/
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Dead Gowns is the project of Portland-Maine singer-songwriter Geneviève Beaudoin. In her latest collection, the HOW EP, she pushes “expressive arrangements and raw melodies into a glowing spectacle” (Foxy Digitalis). Both urgent and sincere, it’s “the sound of a songwriter coming good on all her promises and then some” (For the Rabbits).
https://deadgowns.bandcamp.com
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https://thefascinatingchimeraproject.bandcamp.com/