The Bruise by Claire Cronin is out now! Posted 09 Oct 2026

Claire Cronin's stunning new album The Bruise is out now!

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.

PRAISE FOR THE BRUISE

Listening to the music of Claire Cronin feels a little like eavesdropping on an exorcism... This is searing gothic-folk, song-stories with a brooding edge, like the Brothers Grimm. Beautiful, but brutally so." – Dusted Magazine

"haunted but gorgeous, reflecting on life in the shadows but not dwelling in them" – Post-Trash

"echoing, desolate, and immersive doom folk" – Under the Radar Magazine

"a doom-metal artist (in the way that) she understands how to extract the occult energy of the genre and repurpose it for minimalist, haunting folk songs" – Flood Magazine

"You will not find colorful descriptions of pagan ritual murder, nor English countryside orgy. You’ll find folk horror transposed into the ordinary: the godlessness in a parent’s death (“I saw no angels /Faces like ragdolls”); your environment slowly revealing its anti-life flavor (“Helicopter search beam/ Thought it was the holy ghost/ Oh, that was made to hurt me”); and the things you lean on to give your life meaning – even symbols of death – disappearing in ordinary ways (“But the world never ends in a crash / And this house is not covered in ash”)."

"But the more I listened to it, the less I heard the grief and the more I heard a more primal isolation. On the album closer, Cronin sings, “Hope is what you had when you were nine.” This is what is meant by folk horror: despair at your world ending, at the way the world looks as it ends, and at the recognition that any possibility of making sense of it disappeared long ago." – Sun-13

"Claire Cronin’s new album grapples with unimaginable trauma and horror. It’ll leave you shattered and stunned. Essential listening." – Turn & Work

The Bruise Iridescent gold vinyl, classic black vinyl, digital downloads & a 20-page Risograph-printed Lyrics & Art zine are shipping now! ORDER YOUR COPY HERE. Cassette tapes are available from A Moth Object.

Claire Cronin shares "Iris in Pyre," the final advance single from her new album of folk horror-themed slowcore, The Bruise Posted 05 Oct 2026

“Iris in Pyre,” the final advance single from American doom folk songwriter Claire Cronin's fourth LP The Bruise, was premiered today by Under the Radar Magazine. Under the Radar’s Caleb Campbell writes: ‘‘Iris in Pyre’ is a desolate, echoing mood piece. Cronin is a spectral presence, guiding the track with a hypnotic vocal performance as the instrumentation creeps at a moody, roiling simmer. The track’s acoustic undercurrents root it in meditative folk music, but Cronin and her collaborators also layer textures together to sinister effect, undergirding her droning melodies with hard slabs of rocky black distortion. It never quite resolves, instead letting Cronin’s vocals fade away as the track winds on toward its end, colored by mournful funeral synth tones.”

“Iris in Pyre,” follows previous singles ”Black Water” &”Before the End of Time.”

Claire Cronin on “Iris in Pyre”

“Iris in Pyre is about how it hurts to see terrible things. I’m singing about burning the irises of my eyes, of dyeing my clothes black in a kind of funeral pyre. The images in the song speak to threats of violence, social sickness, and fascist displays of power. It’s the feeling I get when reading the news.

The song wants to be slow, heavy doom metal. It’s not as extreme as that, but we used layering to create weight — with multiple guitars, vocals, and the drone of harmonium and synth. We also added a substrate of field recordings: digging in the dirt, moving rocks around. And the sound of Catholic friars chanting, which I recorded through the muffled encasement of my coat pocket.”

Claire Cronin on the “Iris in Pyre” visualizer

“For this video, I used cut-up footage of forest fires from a 1970s instructional film from the Prelinger Archives. The song centers on a metaphor of burning and a feeling of horror, so I think it creates the right atmosphere. While watching this footage, I can’t help but worry about climate change and the wildfires that have torn across the world in past months.”

The Bruise 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.

Blithe Field announces new album & movie Hard Core Soft Wear, shares first single "Milked Rainbow" Posted 23 Sep 2026

Nelsonville, Ohio home-recording enthusiast Spencer Radcliffe's sublime instrumental project Blithe Field returns with Soft Core Hard Wear, the project's first album since 2023's Grits Kissed & first for Orindal Records.

Soft Core Hard Wear is a suite of eighteen moments made from synthesizer, sampler, and cassette tape. Accompanying the album is a full-length movie of the same name, comprised of warped and meted together found VHS tapes, color, and general video experiments.

Watch the video for lead-off track Milked Rainbow:

Soft Core Hard Wear is out October 23, 2026. Cassette tapes & downloads are available for pre-order HERE.

CATCH BLITHE FIELD LIVE
Oct 20, 2026- Detroit, MI @ The Loving Touch (w/ Horse Jumper of Love)
Dec 13, 2026- Columbus, OH @ Rambling House (w/ bobbie & Advance Base)

Folk horror songwriter Claire Cronin shares "Before the End of Time" from her forthcoming album The Bruise Posted 21 Sep 2026

Claire Cronin has shared the second single from The Bruise, her forthcoming album of dread-laden horror folk. "Before the End of Time." is a slow-burn ballad about an imagined apocalypse featuring strings by Ezra Buchla & musical saw by Mark Wessels.

Cronin writes:

“This one is about feeling deep nostalgia, grief, and a fear of apocalypse in a world that’s on the edge of ruin. I was thinking about paranoia and delusion, and remembering walks I took when I lived in east Hollywood, where helicopters were always circling.

“When I sing the chorus, I like to imagine I’m the ghost of an old crooner like Frank Sinatra, singing to the victims of a shipwreck. At the end of the song, my sense of longing is too intense and I ask to be taken out of time.”

The single comes with a crowd-sourced music video assembled by Cronin. She explains:

“To make this video, I put out a call on social media for contributions, asking people to send me short clips of things they think they’ll miss at the end of time, the end of their lives, or the end of the world — however they wished to interpret that. I chose from among those entries, added a few of my own, and then edited it all together. I tried to make the transitions match the movements of the song.

“I found it poignant that there was a lot of repetition in what people sent me— so many coastlines, bodies of water, skies, trees, children, animals, and shimmering lights.”

Post-Trash premiered "Before the End of Time" with a short essay on The Bruise by Dan Goldin. Goldin writes:

Claire Cronin songs are commonly described as “folk horror,” occupying a place that is haunted but gorgeous, reflecting on life in the shadows but not dwelling in them. Her songs live and breathe in the late night hours, channeling “spiritual dread” with a sense of warmth, the flicker of a solitary candle lighting the path beyond. Her third album, The Bruise, is said to be inspired by both doom metal and avant-garde drone music, but while they might play into Cronin’s languid structures, they do not play into the sound. Emotionally heavy and weary of our world, her music is soft, gentle, and built around her unflinching vocals and acoustic textures. Set for release on October 9th via Orindal Records (Ruth Garbus, Spencer Radcliffe, Duffy x Uhlmann), Cronin is obscuring visions of engrained terror with serenity, her words a surrealist meditation on shifting morbidity, familial grief, and the profundity of bringing the next generation into the world.

“Before the End of Time” is the record’s second single, a beautifully sparse composition that ruminates on the thoughts that rush through our mind when it all comes to an end. Claire Cronin plays with a slow-drawn intensity, the song moving at a languid pace, lush with sweeping contributions from Cronin’s husband, collaborator, and mixing engineer Ezra Buchla (viola) and Mark Wessels (musical saw). With a dreamy yet dreary lullaby atmosphere, Cronin’s words ring gently upon the air, lost in thought and uninterested in drawing definitive conclusions.

Read the full piece HERE.

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.

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

Watch Duffy x Uhlmann perform "Public Life" Posted 04 Aug 2026

Meg Duffy & Gregory Uhlmann perform "Public Life" from Duffy x Uhlmann's forthcoming album Hot Creek (out August 14 on Orindal Records). Video by Alex LaLiberte.

Catch Duffy x Uhlmann live at Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena, CA on August 19!

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


Hot Creek album design by Christina Huang

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

DUFFY X UHLMANN LIVE
Aug 19, 2026- Pasadena, CA @ Sid the Cat Auditorium (w/ Nina Keith)

Duffy x Uhlmann returns with kinetic new instrumental "Doing It for Me" Posted 07 Jul 2026

(Photo credit: Harrison Whitford)

Duffy x Uhlmann, the collaborative instrumental project of Los Angeles experimental guitarists Meg Duffy (Hand Habits) & Gregory Uhlmann (SML) returns after their 2023 debut LP Doubles with “Doing It for Me,” a kinetic new single built from layers of processed guitar loops & textures.

CATCH THE PREMIERE NOW AT FLOOD MAGAZINE

From the band’s biographer, poet Rosie Stockton:
“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.

“Doing It for Me” arrives ahead of Duffy x Uhlmann’s return to the stage: August 19 at Sid the Cat Auditorium in Pasadena, CA with special guest Nina Keith.

"Doing It for Me" is available for stream & purchase from Bandcamp.

Profound by Ruth Garbus is out now! Posted 12 Jun 2026

"Somehow elegant and oddball at once (but more often elegant), the album does indeed live up to its title." – Marcy Donelson, AllMusic

"Her tools are all soft and ingratiating—whispery soprano, delicate melodies, the glow of electric keyboards, the occasional click and bump of drum machines—but her work is challenging. Alongside Wendy Eisenberg, Garbus is extending the possibilities of acoustic songwriter pop." – Jennifer Kelly, Bandcamp Daily

Profound, the new album by Brattleboro, Vermont, singer-songwriter Ruth Garbus, is out now! You can stream Profound HERE.

Profound is available for purchase on gold metallic vinyl, classic black vinyl, compact disc & digital formats from HERE.

Ruth Garbus Trio (featuring Nicholas Bisceglia & elie mcafee-hahn) are heading out on tour! Don't miss em live.

June 26, 2026- Burlington VT @ Light Club Lamp Shop
June 27, 2026- Brattleboro, VT @ The Stone Church
Aug 18, 2026- San Diego, CA @ Gelato Vero
Aug 19, 2026- Los Angeles, CA @ 2220 Arts
Aug 20, 2026- Santa Cruz, CA @ Crepe Place
Aug 21, 2026- San Francisco, CA @ 4 Star Theater
Aug 23, 2026- Bolinas, CA @ Gospel Flat Farmstand
Aug 24, 2026- Nevada City, CA @ Sans Back Up Plan
Aug 26, 2026- Portland, OR @ Laverne's
Aug 27, 2026- Seattle, WA @ Vera Project
Aug 28, 2026- Anacortes, WA @ The Depot
Aug 29, 2026- Bellingham, WA @ Temple Bar
Aug 30, 2026- Vancouver, BC TBA