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Claire Cronin announces new album The Bruise, shares leadoff track "Black Water" Posted 20 Aug 2026


(Photo courtesy of Claire Cronin)

File Under:
folk horror /American spiritual dread / heavy music / slowcore / nocturnal mothers / uncanny atmospheres / transcendence / hauntology / family curses / sincerity / diabolus in music / experimental doom / negative theology / childbirth / hymns

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Old radios. Ritual bells. A cawing crow. A mother singing in the darkness. These figures haunt The Bruise—the new album of heavy folk songs from musician and writer Claire Cronin.

Her third release on Orindal Records after Big Dread Moon (2019) and Bloodless (2021), and crafted in the same spirit as her cult-favorite book, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God (2020), The Bruise is an immersive sequel in Cronin’s brand of folk horror.

Inspired by the atmospheres of doom metal and the spectral, disintegrating layers of avant-garde drone music, The Bruise is evocative and textured, but still centered on Cronin’s voice and guitar. Vocals are tripled with eerie harmonies, like sad angels singing. Electric guitars are bent to sound like old radio transmissions. The warm, spiritual hum of a harmonium spills across tracks. An Irish bodhrán keeps time at loose intervals. Musical saws, ritual bells, and violas make the weather that Cronin’s voice wades through.

The premiere of The Bruise's leadoff track, "Black Water," comes courtesy of Flood Magazine. Flood's Mike LeSuer writes:

Claire Cronin is a doom-metal artist in the same way someone like Marissa Nadler is a doom-metal artist: she understands how to extract the occult energy of the genre and repurpose it for minimalist, haunting folk songs that wouldn’t sound out of place on a bill with Bell Witch. Today she’s announcing that she’ll make her return in October (naturally) with a new album called The Bruise, with the lead single “Black Water” proving to be yet another dark ballad about something unexpectedly ordinary. “When I first wrote this song, I wasn’t sure what the imagery was about, but it felt emotionally true,” the artist shares. “Two years after I finished it, I had a harrowing experience while giving birth to my second child. That nearness to death and life felt like something the song prophesied.”


The Bruise will be released October 9, 2026 on Orindal Records and A Moth Object.

Iridescent gold vinyl, classic black vinyl, digital downloads & a 20-page Risograph-printed Lyrics & Art zine are available for pre-order HERE. Cassette tapes are available from A Moth Object.






Hot Creek by Duffy Uhlmann is out now! Posted 14 Aug 2026

Hot Creek is out now! Stream it HERE. Buy it HERE.

Duffy x Uhlmann is a collaborative instrumental project by Meg Duffy & Gregory Uhlmann, two of Los Angeles' most inventive young guitarists. Hot Creek follows the duo's hypnotic 2023 debut LP 𝘿𝙤𝙪𝙗𝙡𝙚𝙨.

Delving deeper into the duo's improvisatory musical language & dreamlike signal processing techniques, Hot Creek moves like water across thirteen kinetic instrumental tracks.

Read the Vinyl District's review

Read the Old Grey Cat's review

Duffy x Uhlmann will celebrate the release of Hot Creek with an album release show on Wednesday, August 19 at Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena, CA. Nina Keith opens. Tickets are on sale HERE.


Listen to "Nylon Waiting Room," the final advance single from Duffy x Uhlmann's new album Hot Creek, out this Friday! Posted 11 Aug 2026

Photo credit: Harrison Whitford

Meg Duffy & Gregory Uhlmann will release their second album of guitar duets, Hot Creek, this Friday, August 14 on Orindal Records! In advance of Friday's release, the duo have shared one last advance single from Hot Creek, a 51-second instrumental titled "Nylon Waiting Room." The single is accompanied by another beautiful visualizer by album art designer Christina Huang. Watch it below:



Hot Creek is available for pre-order on creek water color vinyl, classic black vinyl, cassette tape & digital formats HERE.


Duffy x Uhlmann will celebrate the release of Hot Creek with an album release show at Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena, CA on August 19. Tickets are available HERE.


Listen to two songs from Sand Duney's debut album Plant Material Posted 05 Aug 2026




Plant Material is the first full-length album from Sand Duney, the project of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Jess Jones (Dear Nora, Jessica Dennison + Jones, Hot Gum, Cynthia Nelson Band). Plant Material builds on the sonic landscape and themes present in Sand Duney’s three song EP, The Julia Loop, released in 2021. Starting that year, Jones went back to school to study landscape design and sustainable gardening, which led to a radical shift in how she interacted with and understood the plant world—both its extreme vulnerabilities in the changing climate and its resiliencies—and how she understood herself, her partnership, and her community. The year she started school, she also married her wife. From the outset, “Out On A Dune” places us at the edge of the ocean, on the cusp of new and enduring love. Jones sings, “Feels like / A different sun / Has come up.”



Jess Jones played every instrument on Plant Material, including pedal steel, acoustic and electric guitar, bass, organ, and drums. She also recorded and mixed the record herself at home in Portland, OR and Missoula, MT. At first, Jones started experimenting with creating recordings that were one-take performances direct to 2-track reel-to-reel, often based around loops or underlying grooves. Her deep love of classic country and jazz recordings led her to think about how much those recordings relied on the magic of live performance. All the instrumental songs on Plant Material—“Spring” “Tilth” and “Mycelium”—are all direct to tape recordings, with no overdubs. Others, like “Jacaranda” “Deadnettle” and “Pages” have a bed of the original direct-to-tape grooves, but were then multi-tracked over. With this method, the songs on Plant Material achieve a feeling of spontaneous playing and the snapshot in time of live performance, but are also meticulously crafted and edited. The result is a record that moves and sounds like water through a deep canyon, every layer guiding us somewhere new.

Plant Material will be released September 4 by Anything Bagel, Bud Tapes & Orindal Records. Cassette tapes w/ downloads can be purchases direct from Orindal. Vinyl & standalone downloads can be purchased via Bandcamp.


Catch Sand Duney live!

Aug 13, 2026- Daisy Chain Fest, Missoula, MT
Sept 03, 2026- Seattle, WA @ House Show w/ Eli Moore (Lake), 129,600
Sept 04, 2026- Langley, WA @ Salad Days Records w/ Eli Moore (Lake), 129,600
Sept 05, 2026- Portland, OR @ Turn Turn Turn, w/ Cynthia Nelson Band, Dragging an Ox Through Water



Duffy x Uhlmann announce second album Hot Creek, share "Public Life" Posted 21 Jul 2026

Photo credit: Harrison Whitford

HOT CREEK, THE SECOND COLLABORATIVE ALBUM BY THE DUO OF MEG DUFFY & GREGORY UHLMANN (FOLLOWING THEIR 2023 DEBUT DOUBLES) IS OUT AUGUST 14 ON ORINDAL RECORDS

“A last attempt: the language is a dialect called metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier, flashlight.
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: these mountains have a meaning
But further than that I could not say.

To do something very common, in my own way.”

– Adrienne Rich, “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”

Hot Creek, the second album from Meg Duffy and Gregory Uhlmann’s project Duffy x Uhlmann, unspools in the spirit of what poet Adrienne Rich called “a dream of a common language.” Taking Hot Creek, the geothermal spring that courses through Mono County, California, as its guiding metaphor, Duffy and Uhlmann’s melodic conversation both carves out a streambed and fills it with all temporalities of water: rapid, eddy, flood. In this sonic cartography, the waterway holds the trickling improvisations in the same way that grammar holds language, a container for what inevitably exceeds containment.

In this exquisite and existential elaboration of their collaboration, Duffy and Uhlmann develop the shared syntax initiated in their debut album Doubles. With only two guitars, Hot Creek departs from the first album’s gritty, urban soundscape, touching down in the natural world to explore a different dream. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s well worn adage that you can’t step in the same river twice, these songs chart constant change, loss, and discovery, eschewing staticness of place and space. Hot Creek traverses – with both mischievousness and grief – the fact of impermanence, slips of the tongue, valuing equally what is lost and what is found, and what is made new through evolutions of repetition.

The opening track, “Doing It for Me,” winks at the fact of collaboration: a palimpsest-like collective of two individuals trying to reach each other. Here, they establish a rhythmic base that feels like a time-lapse bloom and ends with a swirling gallop, and slowly introduce bubbling guitar riffs that pirouette before becoming part of the ensemble of inside jokes and shifting moods. “To Be a Good Friend” opens and closes with the sound of footsteps and muffled voices approaching and receding. Like any good conversationalist, Duffy and Uhlmann have mastered the art of crescendo, but also the art of trailing off. In other words, the art of withstanding the space between true connection and fundamental mysteriousness of the other. “Plumeria” follows with agile and sweet staccato, punctuated by bright and soothing pauses: so much is said in the space between the riffs.

From these caesuras, the album thematizes the relationship between any utterance and what it obscures. “Sewering” drops us underground, where echoing drips ricochet through rusted pipes and crickets sing in the dark. We listen to “Public Life” from below, a soothing melancholic interlude of seeing and being seen that alludes to the currents underneath. This tentative lullaby culminates with the twang of the title track, “Hot Creek” and “The Source,” which slow everything to a near-hypnotic suspension, all while turning wide-eyed toward origin, centering the wonder of hearing a song before it hardens into predetermined meaning. This is musical language getting born, leading us to ask where does the water come from? Where does the love go? To answer these questions, the album widens into deep time with “Finding Methuselah,” which ricochets and reverbs notes between a four thousand year old tree aching on a hillside in Inyo County and the Milky Way itself.

Duffy and Uhlmann’s Hot Creek gives us the gift of listening to the birth of a common language in real time. Their melodies and rhythms move with the sweet vernacular of geothermic water and all its earthly infrastructures, accomplishing the profound potential of nonauthorship only collaboration allows, while also in Rich’s words, doing something very common, in their own way.

– Rosie Stockton