Skullcrusher

And Your Song is Like a Circle, the second album from New York-basedartist Skullcrusher, a.k.a. Helen Ballentine, winds its way into an everchanging, unstablecore. Recorded piecemeal over a period of years following the release of her celebrated2022 debut, Quiet the Room, And Your Song is Like a Circle does not capture experience it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable. Swaying between vaporous folk and crystalline electronics, landing somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as whats been lost.Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city shed called home fornearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New Yorks Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks.Throughout the record, the line between human and machine blurs. On Maelstrom,voices crash between echoing drumbeats like water through a cavern. The vocal filigrees on Exhale fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. Dragon lets piano echo over tight, gritted percussion.If Skullcrushers first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domesticspace, Circle finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. Itskirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes. These are songs that vibrate with the fervency of an attempt to capture a moment, to draw a circle around it. I like thinking about my work as a collection, Ballentine says. Eventually it might form a circle. Each time I make something, Im putting another line around the body of work. It feels like Ill be trying to trace it for my whole life.