Skullcrusher returns with a record that studies presence the way a painter studies light, watching how it fades and pools as the day turns. And Your Song Is Like a Circle thinks out loud about grief, dislocation, and memory’s unruly half-life. The songs feel discovered rather than built, arriving in fragments before drifting just out of reach.
The opening track, “March,” sketches the album’s method with stark piano and hushed space. It reads like a threshold. Once you step through, the record widens into ambient folk and quiet electronics. “Exhale” gathers layered harmonies until they glow, then smudges the edges with synth and strings. “Dragon” uses close-mic’d piano and gritted percussion to map out a heavier mood, patient and unblinking.
Helen Ballentine’s writing attends to the near-at-hand: dishes in the sink, late-night rooms that keep their own counsel. A line will flash in the mix, then retreat, guiding the next listen. On “Living,” she treats routine as a lens rather than a trap, letting a simple figure swell with choral overtones until the ordinary acquires weight. “Periphery” edges toward dissolution, acoustic guitar holding a line while synths mist the margins. You can hear the tug between clarity and blur.
The palette is deceptively rich. Contact mics and gentle distortion give the vocals a tactile grain, close enough to catch the breath between phrases. Keys ring like frost. Guitars arrive as faint halos or steady handholds. The record leans into crystalline electronics but never abandons its folk bones. On first pass, you might miss how often the arrangements shift in small increments. By the third, those shifts feel like the record’s pulse.
Listeners who file Grouper and Julia Holter near each other will recognize the preference for atmosphere that still admits melody. At times the piano carries a quiet solemnity that nods toward Bon Iver’s more skeletal passages, not in imitation but in a shared belief that restraint can do real work. Ballentine keeps the frame slim so that timbre, silence, and decay become compositional tools.
Mid-sequence, “Maelstrom” earns its title without storm effects. Voices stack and collide against echoing drums, like a thought that cannot settle. It courts density, and its unease feels purposeful. Later, “Red Car” loosens the grip, built on a modest progression that catches a breeze of reverb. The flow between heaviness and light is measured, suiting an album that distrusts easy catharsis.
The back half floats over adjacent tempos and similar tonal shades. First-time listeners may wish for a sharper left turn, but the length serves the record’s circular logic. What looks like drift on initial contact reads as intention with time. The cohesion is not a trap but an environment.
Written after a west-to-east move and a period of isolation, these pieces sound alert to the edges of rooms and to hours that resist naming. You can feel a house becoming an instrument. You can hear landscape press on the writing without turning into scenery.
What lingers is Ballentine’s command of scale. She can make a whisper feel durable, place a single piano note so it carries a stanza’s worth of intent. When electronics enter, they serve contrast, not novelty. The voice remains the hinge, capable of holding a phrase so lightly it almost slips away, then returning to pin it down with a harmony that lands like a hand on a shoulder.
And Your Song Is Like a Circle rewards patience. It’s less a set of singles than a field of related moods, built for close attention and quiet rooms. The album loops ideas until they change shape, charting how songs behave once they leave the writer and enter a listener’s life. By the last track, the circle is not a trap but a method, a way of tending to what refuses to resolve. In that care, Skullcrusher finds a voice that feels fully her own.
The album is out now on Secretly Canadian.
Skullcrusher plays Bar le Ritz PDB on 10 April 2026. BUY TICKETS
Photo – Adam Alonzo
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