Hear as the Mirror Echoes, the debut album by Bristol, UK's herbal tea, is out now! Find it on your preferred streaming serviceHERE.
Here's what the press has to say about Hear as the Mirror Echoes:
"wistful, bittersweet, and deeply nostalgic, like flipping through an old photo book of half-forgotten memories." – Under The Radar
"music that exemplifies ambient pop at its loveliest, as structured and
singable as it is apt to dissolve into glimmering pools of sweet sound." –
Bandcamp
"blissfully woozy, dreamy pop... It’s a very promising album that doesn’t fight for your attention, but just creeps in under your skin and stays there." – No More Workhorse
"With 'Hear as the
Mirror Echoes', herbal tea has crafted a debut that feels both timeless
and deeply personal, a mirror that reflects not only her own solitude,
but perhaps our own as well." – Mystic Sons
"herbal tea takes the DIY intimacy of bedroom pop and expands outwards, building what might otherwise be humble demos into rich, nuanced soundscapes, as though the original basis of each track is merely a door through which entire new worlds lie in wait." – Various Small Flames
Hear as the Mirror Echoes, the debut album by herbal tea is out this Friday, August 29th!
In anticipation of Hear as the Mirror Echoes' release, herbal tea is sharing a music video for the album's third & final single, "Driving Slow." Under the Radar Magazine premiered the video this morning. UTR's Caleb Campbell writes:
Much like the record’s previous two singles, “Driving Slow” operates at a
dreamy, laconic lull, bringing forth the aching and evocative qualities
to Walker’s songwriting. However, in contrast to those earlier efforts,
the track strips back the layers of swirling instrumentation and
reverb, leaving only some sparse acoustic guitar and keys to guide
Walker’s lullaby-like vocal tracks. Meanwhile, Walker lilts gently above
the spacious instrumentation, her vocals enmeshed in a lo-fi haze. The
results feel wistful, bittersweet, and deeply nostalgic, like flipping
through an old photo book of half-forgotten memories.
Read the full article, which includes some thoughts on "Driving Slow" from herbal tea's Helena Walker, & watch the music video now on the Under the Radar site.
An established devotee of dark weirdness, Greg Jamie brings forth his second solo album on Orindal: Across a Violet Pasture (out October 10, 2025). Across ten new songs recorded with his longtime collaborator Colby Nathan, Jamie journeys to the strange, enchanted center of his
personal vision. This is a space between sleeping and waking, where
Jamie’s woodsy, weary voice guides us forward.
It’s no surprise that the latest from the Maine-based musician and
visual artist aims to haunt, but this experimental folk pop does it in a
way that’s more playful than funereal. It lays a shimmering floor over
the abyss.
The strength of Across a Violet Pasture is its intuitive
rawness. It’s art made at home; the product of a deep inner life and a
personal mythology. And like Greg Jamie’s uncanny watercolor paintings,
this record juxtaposes muted, dark backgrounds with shocks of vibrant
color. The “violet pasture” of the title evokes a mix of passionate red
and cool, sorrowful blue. The resulting purple is mystical and a little
extravagant. It’s a color hardly found in nature. And when it is, like
the violet flower, it survives only in dappled forest shade. Admired by
hermits, fauns, and idealistic weirdos, there’s a secretive, melancholy,
and ephemeral beauty to this work.
Greg Jamie on "I'd Get Away": I’d Get Away is the first song on the album. Making this song felt like a breakthrough for the whole record for me, sonically. It's sort of a surf ballad about letting go of what you can’t change, and moving on from what is final. Transcendence and fog. Clarity after death. Blow up nostalgia and just be. Check out that slide and drift away.
Pre-order Across a Violet Pasture vinyl LPs, tapes, downloads & set of 6 limited edition postcards HERE.
Herbal tea is the DIY recording project of Bristol, UK singer/songwriter/producer Helena Walker. "Submarine," the second single from herbal tea's debut albumHear as the Mirror Echoes, is now streaming everywhere.
Sonically, the track takes inspiration from the titular submersible,
creating a foggy, underwater feel by drawing on slowcore, ambient music
and lo-fi indie rock. Lyrically, the song lingers on the feeling of
longing for warmth and safety, for somewhere out of view, where the
listener can disappear.
Helena Walker of herbal tea on "Submarine:" “When I wrote ‘Submarine’, I thought I was poking at old wounds, but now the meaning keeps shifting as time goes by. It touches on the feeling of wanting to disappear into a safe place, in the night, where you feel invisible. It started as a dreamy demo recorded on my laptop and over time grew heavier and louder. It was the only track where we went to the studio to record drums, which was a new experience for me.”
Accompanying the single is a DIY video, shot on camcorder around Nottingham and entirely filmed and edited by Walker and regular collaborator, Henry C Sharpe (multi-instrumentalist and Gold Day Recordings head-honcho).
“Submarine” follows Hear as the Mirror Echoes’ lead single and opening track, “Seventeen.” Stereogum describes “Seventeen” as “full-on Grouper-like ambient pop.” GoldFlakePaint praises the single as “woozy and melancholy” and “wholly captivating.”
Hear as the Mirror Echoes by herbal tea is out August 29 on Orindal (US) & Gold Day (UK).
Pre-order Hear as the Mirror Echoes on vinyl, cassette & digital formats HERE.
Philadelphia, PA fingerstyle guitarist & singer Kristin Daelyn is hitting the road in September, bringing intimate solo performances to stages across the Northeastern US. She'll be playing songs from her Orindal debut Beyond the Break& sharing bills with likeminded songsmiths like Adeline Hotel, Camp St Helene, Will Stratton, Katy Pinke & her Orindal labelmate Annie Hart!
Dusted Magazine describes Kristin Daelyn's music as "pristine gardens of sound... she picks delicate lattices of shimmering guitar and floats elegiac melodies way up into the stratosphere." Don't miss her live! Get your tickets HERE.
New York-based composer & multi-instrumentalist Matt Bachmann is back with his first new music since 2021's Dream Logic. Compost Karaoke, an entirely new album of "bedroom chamber music" featuring contributions from James Krivchenia (Big Thief), Derek Baron (Reading Group Records), & Jeff Tobias (Modern Nature, Sunwatchers), is Bachmann's most adventurous, engaging & fully realized music to date. Richly decorated with horns, woodwinds, percussion, synthesizers, vibraphones, and guitar pedal sonic reimagining,
Compost Karaoke is a musical habitat wholly unique, yet nodding to
Bachmann’s guiding stars—Ryuichi Sakamoto, Natural Information Society,
and RJ Miller, to name a few.
In advance of Compost Karaoke's September 12th release, Orindal Records is proud to share the album's first single & music video, "TIAGDTD."
Foxy Digitalis premiered "TIAGDTD" yesterday, describing it as "a slow hallucination, spiraling inward with a strange grace. Matt
Bachmann builds a rhythmic floor that feels both meditative and
unsteady, where Derek Baron’s minimalist drums and James Krivchenia’s
congas form a kind of twitchy heartbeat under clouds of bass clarinet
and flickering synth debris. The track hovers in that space between
stillness and motion, tension and trance. The video leans into that
ambiguity, with Bachmann and Sophia Treanor moving in loose, mirrored
choreography. Green spandex limbs lock in poses that shift from hypnotic
to uncanny. It’s a little like Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno
by way of dream logic: odd, tender, a little absurd, and entirely
mesmerizing. Everything floats just slightly off-axis but never loses
its pull."
From Matt Bachmann:
"TIAGDTD"'s music video was inspired by a behavioral tic of my late father, who would rub his hands together and grimace as he watched television. The video is an attempt to inhabit the alien behavior as an attempt to understand it. It was amazing to collaborate with Adam Baron-Bloch, Sophia Treanor and V Haddad who each brought their beautiful creative selves to help make something beyond what I could have dreamed of.
"TIAGDTD" is an acronym for a Klingon phrase, "Today is a Good Day to Die." The Klingons are the warrior race within the Star Trek universe, valuing honor above all. To Klingons, there is nothing more honorable than dying in battle, hence the phrase. A central tension for Worf, one of the main Klingon characters, is adapting to society within the federation of planets; Klingons are such a spirited race (drinking blood wine, fighting, listening to opera) and to live within the federation's society, Worf has to detach from his culture. I would tear up when Worf would say "Today is a Good Day to Die" because it felt like he was finally permitted to be his full self. I wrote this song while watching Deep Space 9 during the pandemic and it was partially conceived as an ode to Worf.
British DIY artist herbal tea's debut album Hear as the Mirror Echoes
drifts in and out like a half-remembered dream, shaped slowly by
songwriter/producer Helena Walker from late-night demos that gradually
bloomed into expansive arrangements.
Drawing on dream pop, ambient folk, and lo-fi production, and citing influences from Sparklehorse to Sharon Van Etten,
there's an otherworldly quality in the way it softly reimagines the
familiar. From the ethereal slowcore of "Seventeen" to the 70s
folk-inspired "Driving Slow", each track belongs to its own distinct
world. The songs swell with ambient textures and bursts of distortion,
building into cinematic crescendos before folding back into quiet
moments of sparse piano and lo-fi dissonance. Helena's vocals, often
recorded at the time of writing, are ghostly with an undercurrent of
gravity, submerged within layers of rich harmonies. Themes of
impermanence, dissociation, and emotional transience run throughout,
with lyrics lifted from dreams, old diaries, and moments of
stream-of-consciousness.
“I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider, and making music is my
escape.”
Helena says. “I hope this album can be that escape for someone
else.”
Orindal (US) & Gold Day (UK) will release Hear as the Mirror Echoes on vinyl, cassette & digital formats on August 29, 2025. Today we're sharing the album's first single "Seventeen" & its accompanying music video directed by Chris Pugh.
One of Helena’s earliest self-recordings, the first of which she felt truly represented her, “Seventeen” has been through several stylistic transformations since the original demo, a process that helped her and, collaborator and childhood friend, Henry C Sharpe (Sleep Radio) develop the overarching sound of the record.
Sonically the song is a lush, cinematic wall of noise combining hazy guitars, piano and synths with Helena’s dreamlike, layered vocals. It’s a tantalising glimpse into her universe. “‘Seventeen’ was written whilst processing trauma, dissociation and a longing to feel free. I wrote the lyrics in a stream of consciousness. It was one of the first songs where I used songwriting and recording as a form of therapy.” Helena elaborates on the themes behind the single. “I held onto this song for years, but it was hard to get it to fit sonically. It went through so many versions until it finally captured the feeling of the demo. That process ended up sparking a domino effect for the sounds and textures that became the foundation of the entire album. There is a section halfway where the chaos stills and the piano and vocals re-emerge. It’s one of my favourite moments on the record.
Pre-order Hear as the Mirror Echoes on vinyl, cassette & digital formats HERE.
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Ocean Path, a new 5-song EP by Portland, Maine psych folk artist Lisa/Liza, is out now!
“Ocean Path is a look back at the first songs I made in my
teens and early twenties, including some of my very first recordings. For me, it is a letter from my younger self.” – Lisa/Liza
Find Ocean Path on your preferred streaming service HERE.
Purchase Ocean Path on limited edition cassette & digital formats HERE.
“Deliberate, unhurried songs made in the image of nature’s patient rhythms" – Various Small Flames
On June 27, Orindal Records will release Ocean Path, a
5-song, 27-minute EP of early home recordings by Maine-based singer,
songwriter & guitarist Liza Victoria’s long-running psych folk
project Lisa/Liza. Ocean Path follows Lisa/Liza’s 2023 album Breaking and Mending, an album described by Stereogum as "Spectral and immersive," Deepest Currents as "Incredible" & Post-Trash as "An instant salve."
“Summer’s Dust,” the leadoff track from Ocean Path, is available to stream today in advance of the EP's June 27 release.
Ocean Path is available for pre-order on cassette & digital formats HERE.
Some words on Ocean Path from Lisa/Liza’s Liza Victoria:
Ocean Path is a look back at the first songs I made in my teens and
early twenties, including some of my very first recordings, such as
“Gamble.” For me, it is a letter from my younger self.
This cassette leads down paths of memory, reminding me we are always becoming and growing into who we are and what will be.
There is a peace and sense of pride in holding these songs now in the form of a curated cassette, giving them a place to be.
I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to share my inner world with
others. And now I see where that lead me and feel gratitude for the path
set out before me.
Each song holds time between it, at least a year between each, love
and memory, and different worlds of view, threads between them.
As much as I hope this cassette shares a small piece of me with
others, it is also a little sign on the road that says “keep going.”
Knowing all there is that encourages the path to roll forward,
friends, different lives, and loves met along the way, encouraging me to
hit record and to sing a little louder. It feels hopeful and is a
feeling of being held.
"I Let The Wind Push Down On Me is a beautiful album through and through." — Stereogum
"I Let The Wind Push Down On Me, the second album from Chicago’s Moontype, is due out at the end of this week and it’s fantastic, an indie rock record with art pop dexterity and more than anything else, a true sense of vision." — Post Trash
"Moontype radiate the kind of feelings we’re all chasing." — Paste Magazine
I Let The Wind Push Down On Me, the new album by Chicago, IL's own Moontype, is out now & everybody loves it!
Moontype play their album release show for I Let The Wind Push Down On Me
this Sunday at the Empty Bottle in Chicago with support from Krill 2
& Fran. Moontype will be touring across the USA throughout the
summer, including a September tour supporting Frankie Cosmos! You'll
find all of their live dates HERE.
In 2021, Moontype released their debut LP Bodies of Water. A brand new Chicago band on a small independent label (Born Yesterday), the record made an outsized impact, capturing the attention of outlets like The New York Times, NPR, Stereogum and Pitchfork on the strength of the clear-eyed songwriting of the band's singer/bassist Margaret McCarthy, and the band's gauzy, math-y and full-hearted indie rock. In the years since the band have toured extensively and remained active in their hometown, sharing stages with artists like Frankie Cosmos, Pile, NNAMDÏ, Remember Sports and Finom.
Last month, Moontype returned to announce their signing to Orindal Records and share a new single called "Long Country," and today the band are returning to announce their sophomore LP, I Let The Wind Push Down On Me(out May 23rd on Orindal).
Following the 2021 release of Bodies of Water, the band underwent a recharging period of major and minor transformations. During that time, the band’s lineup grew with the additions of Patter’s Joe Suihkonen, whose other band the Deals has featured collaborations from McCarthy and Moontype drummer Emerson Hunton, and Andrew Clinkman of Spirits Having Fun.
Produced by Katie Von Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn, Moontype's second album, serves as a reinvention for the band—not just for their new and expanded lineup—but for how McCarthy navigates the changes in her own life and the messy feelings she sings about. It's a patient document of feeling things out, being easy on yourself, and finding the beauty in small moments, which "Four Hands ii" exemplifies.
Listen to "Four Hands ii" on your preferred streaming platform HERE.
Watch the "Four Hands ii" music video directed by Ian Kelly:
As
McCarthy became more at ease with herself and her writing, the songs
came together seamlessly. Even tracks that initially presented
challenges, like “Four Hands ii,” turned into North Stars once the band
figured out where it should go. This ineffable creative rhythm gave them
the confidence to hit the studio. First was a session in Chicago at
Jamdek Studios where they’d track each tune as straightforwardly as
possible. “This was our “Rock Band” session,” jokes Hunton. Then, they
intentionally gave themselves a few months to sit with the material
before they decamped to Maryland and New York to record with Katie Von
Schleicher and Nate Mendelsohn. There, they worked on overdubs, vocals,
and tweaking the arrangements. The distance between the two sessions
allowed them to reimagine and recontextualize the material. “We made a
record in Chicago. Then we went to Maryland and broke it,” says
Suihkonen.
McCarthy says of the track:
"This
one is about desire. Body desire, but it’s the same as the feeling of
needing to drive really fast with the windows down and the music loud.
"It
took a while for us to figure this one out, but it’s become one of our
favorites to play. I think the trick was finding the shape, the swells
and the dips."
Pre-order I Let The Wind Push Down On Me on color vinyl, classic black vinyl or digital formats HERE.
(Photo credit: Sarah Rose Currie)
(Photo credit: Paige Jamie Bedard)
