Crooked Words #7 (Mon Rovîa, girldeath, how r u, Laura Quirke)

Mon Rovîa

Born into a civil war in Liberia, Mon Rovîa now calls Chattanooga, Tennessee, his home and its from here that the folk singer and songwriter will release a brand new collection of songs in early 2026.

Held within Bloodline, a sixteen-song collection, his songs feel gentle, almost airy on the surface, but they contain multitudes, deep depths of his own story and collected pieces from along the way. "Spent a lot of my developmental years living in a variety of places with a number of life experiences," he writes in the Bandcamp introduction. "And then layered on top of all of this is the assimilation I felt being a trans-racially adopted refugee. My music in a nutshell is a culmination of these experiences blended with the empathy I feel for the experiences with others. The mission of my music is to heal with others - with every nation and tongue, in due time."

Five of the songs from the forthcoming album are available to stream now and they paint a vivid picture of the magic here; subtle folk songs that seemingly carry a lot of hurt but also a lot of healing. The voice is plaintive but paints details detailed, beautiful pictures. Fiddle, hand-clap percussion, and other textures gently build a fuller world around Mon Rovîa's central performance, which is full of heart, full of spirit. The full album arrives January 9th; listen on Bandcamp.

girldeath

angelism is the sprawling, hypnotic new album from girldeath, a dark ambient/drone project from Glasgow and it's one of my favourite winter releases so far this year.

And it truly does feel like a winter's soundtrack. Across its eleven tracks, that drift and shimmer through more than an hour of music, it depicts sparse and empty streets, rain-dashed windows, nights drawing further and further in. It's also very much a Glasgow record, and it’s hard not to hear the city in the bones of the album; the concrete quiet of early morning;  the echo of club culture and post-rave emptiness; the static traffic of the Kingston Bridge where the album title itself was born.

It isn't all darkness here though. The album was also born of rejuvenation, and though it wanders through the emotional upheaval of things broken, it also allows space for the quiet joy found in beginning again.

I was very pleased to be asked to write some words to accompany the release and I'll share a few of them here:

True to its name, angelism feels ghostly and diffused, both frayed and radiant. Taking inspiration from the likes of Grouper, Tim Hecker, and Claire Rousay, it exists in a liminal space between ambient and drone, where dark textures are stretched and buried under layers of prickly noise that threatens but never fully envelops. 

Across angelism, girldeath has created a deeply felt, sonically ambitious body of work. One that rewards stillness and repetition, the kind of listening that doesn’t seek answers. It’s an album that never rushes, and doesn’t even need to be understood. It just asks that you sit with it awhile. What threads do appear are held gently: love, loss, self-reflection, and an unvarnished kind of tenderness.

A beautiful place to get lost.

how r u

I played a song from lofi project how r u on the most recent Lost Souvenirs radio show, and have been spending a little time getting lost in their latest release, a fleeting but beautiful new four-song EP titled clarence & alabama that makes good on the Duster and Elliott Smith comparisons while still managing to shape the whole thing into something that holds its own unique glow.

The project of Belfast's Thom Southern, the four songs here are wrapped up in just 10 minutes, but they linger. The pace is slow and drawn-out, the songs painting pictures of a world that is smudged by rain, lost to a fading day.

The title-track is indicative of that mood, although here the slowcore aesthetics shimmer under a little more light thanks to the impact of Theo Bleak's gorgeous voice, one that winds itself the outer edges of the song. A beautiful moment on a beautiful release that hopefully sets up something altogether more substantial in 2026.

Laura Quirke

A member of the excellent Lemoncello, and a frequent collaborator of Joshua Burnside, Laura Quirke also makes excellent music under her own name and has recently announced a brand new EP for release in just a couple of weeks.

The Something To Lose EP features four new songs, recorded and produced in Co. Monaghan alongside the wonderful Peter Broderick. It's a collaboration that makes sense too, the winding together of folk and electronic flourishes that can be heard in the EP's first song 'Looking For Answers' symbolic of Broderick's own beautifully detailed discography.

Quirke's voice has always been a thing of wonder, and it remains so here; the real anchor to it all. Though it's surrounded by lush production, her elegant, enigmatic delivery manages to hold both warmth and a sense of detached mystery throughout, even and often in the same line. An "uneasy stillness", to borrow the song's opening lyric.

Rolling on for almost six-minutes, it's a captivating taste of the forthcoming EP that gets a full release on December 19th.

Enjoy listening.