Carla dal Forno opens Confession mid-thought: “I have these thoughts that don’t end.” The record announces itself through that admission, and the sound around it, synths materializing and dissolving, a melodic bassline, a beatbox keeping fractured time, stays out of the way.
Confession is her fourth album, recorded in a studio inside a partially decommissioned hospital in Castlemaine, a small country town in regional Australia. The building’s history seeps in. Long corridors and emptied rooms leave echoes with nowhere useful to go. The atmosphere isn’t gothic or self-consciously strange, it just has a particular stillness, the kind that makes interior noise louder.
Come Around from 2022 had hooks and a kind of release to it. This record withholds. The voice sits closer in the mix, less draped in reverb, and the songs feel diaristic in a way her earlier work rarely did. On Going Out, she describes wanting someone she probably shouldn’t: “Shouldn’t want to kiss you but I do / Shouldn’t want to touch you but I miss you all the time.” The plain syntax is doing real work. The Young Marble Giants DNA is audible but the emotional register is all her own.
Under the Covers slows everything further. The song is about domestic routine, the small gestures that sustain a long relationship, and dal Forno treats them with the same attention she gives the more charged material. The melody barely moves. The bass walks. The vocals arrive in short phrases, slightly breathy, close enough that you notice the breath. The Cannanes and The Garbage & the Flowers are useful reference points, that particular Australian lineage of lo-fi intimacy, but the song doesn’t need the genealogy to hold up.
The instrumentals scattered across the record, Drip Drop, On the Ward, Staying In, function less as filler than as weather changes. On the Ward especially: a dub-inflected bassline threading through the hospital’s specific quiet, the kind of silence that’s building-shaped.
Gave You Up closes things with a kind of acceptance, though dal Forno doesn’t reach for catharsis. The melody hums, something resolves, and then it’s over. The record doesn’t argue its way to peace. It just runs out of unrest for a moment.
Alone With You leans into something poppier, warmer, a different texture from the more withdrawn material. The contrast isn’t announced, it just arrives. And Nighttime moves in the opposite direction, dub-tinged edges, desire loosening into something harder to name, post-punk atmospheres where AC Marias and Dome feel present without being imitated.
Dal Forno set out wanting abstraction and ended up somewhere more exposed. The record she made carries the marks of that change in direction. Songs that demand to be sung plainly, even when plainness costs something.
Confession will be released on April 24, 2026 via Kallista Records.
Photo of Carla dal Forno by Sanjay Fernandes
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