Crooked Words #10: Lande Hekt, Sluice, Hiding Places, Leonor Arnaut

Lande Hekt - Lucky Now

We've reached the period of winter where I'm thinking a lot about light. Sometimes I feel infatuated by its presence, mostly by its lacking. Last week I took myself out to the west coast for a couple of nights away and was greeted with as much bright and golden light as the short days could provide. It fell in through the kitchen window of the cottage I was staying in, laying itself upon the old oak table, the vintage map pinned on the wall, the first three stairs. I squinted into it as I put my body in the cold sea, trying to trick myself into believing it was summer and warmth I was held in.

Both before this, and upon my return, light has been missing. The winters up here are long and colourless. I walk along the water by my house for the fresh air and watch grey waves give way to grey hills give way to grey clouds give way to grey skies. So many shades of grey. As we enter this late-stage of winter, the season feels relentless and never-ending, even though we've danced this dance many times before.

There are ways of tricking ourselves, though. I recently bought one of those alarm clocks that's supposed to wake you up gradually with soft light, replicating the rising of the sun. Music, too, can carry us away to brighter places, or at least just create a colourful version of a world we can step into for a little while.

I hadn't realised that Bristol's Lande Hekt was releasing a new album. I loved her 2022 album House Without A View, and I've played Lucky Now every day since its released last Friday. I was listening to it as I walked around my half-lit flat this morning, as the light-words above were swimming around my brain, and again I noticed new light. I found it in these songs; one of many tricks music can play.

It's a beautiful record, full of jangly indie-rock songs that could be gleaming with happiness or tinged with sadness, depending on how the light catches them. Perhaps it's both of those things at the same time. The most meaningful things usually are, and Lande has a way of holding both in the same hands at the same time.

'Lucky Now', the album's second track, has such a power. Opening slowly, it gradually builds before bursting into brighter life. Its chorus gleams with the restless, far-off days of another season and we can rest there for a moment. It carries a magic in that way, the kind of wonderfully endearing three-minute pop song that Lande has been writing for a long time now – perhaps never quite as wonderfully as she does so here though.

It's neighbour, 'Rabbits', flips the mood again; the album is full of that push and pull, the tension between things. Here the mood is colder and more distant. Now we're in city streets, back in winter, everything existing in the solitude of stark white streetlights and empty branches. "Just now I need to feel like the summer time is near," she sings into this February day, and every word takes us a little closer to it.

Sluice - Beadie

It's been nearly three-years since the release of Sluice's Radial Gate LP, a record that has seemed only to grow in stature in the time since, like a tree planted in just the right time and place. Both incredibly smart and endearingly heartfelt, that album nods to the likes of Smog and Jason Molina and, coupled with its own unique vision, left a mark that felt both formative and wholly moving. It's the kind of record I'm always digging around in the soil for, hoping to unearth.

That three-year anniversary will bring new seeds to life in 2026, with the band having recently announced that its follow-up, Companion, will be released on March 27th.

Such news brought new sounds along with it, in the form of 'Beadie', the first single from the band's new chapter. It begins with a dog walk, a shadow on the pavement, recollections of things left behind, stories told and shared and passed on. Much like much of Radial Gate, the idiosyncratic lyrics – with their odd contemporary references and wry turns of phrase – build a world around it all, not just inviting us in but holding us along for the ride, arm-in-arm.

Then comes the splinter, the tempered and drifting nature of the storytelling bursting like a distant storm, the whole bristling nature of it set free in a punch of hefty guitars, and heftier drums. It's good. It's really, really good. All wrapped up inside a kind of breathless energy you want to deeply inhale because you know it'll probably disappear again in a flash, in an unprepared second.

And so it goes.

Hiding Places - Waiting

A couple of months ago, Brooklyn's Hiding Places reached out briefly from the shadows to deliver standalone single 'Holy Roller'. All choppy guitars and simmering mood, and led by Audrey Keelin's pensive voice, the track left a heavy, hearty impression. We now know that the song also sits as the second track on their newly-announced new album The Secret To Good Living, which is released in April via our good friends at Keeled Scales (Living Hour, Emily Hines, Common Holly).

Bound to the news comes another cut from that cloth in the form of 'Waiting', an equally dense and endearing slab of moody, occasionally boisterous rock n roll. This time out, Nicholas Byrne takes lead vocal duties and his scuffed croon takes on rousing Molina-like shapes of desolation. Singing right into the hollow darkness of a night sky.

And there is real melancholy here. Not just in the lyrics, in the murky, swarming nature of the instrumentation that wraps itself all around Byrne's voice, but in the story that sits behind it all too. "Hiding Places’ first bassist, Anthony Cozzarelli, left the band in July of 2022.," Bryne explains of the new song. "I wrote the chorus the day before Anthony left the band. I recalled the slow death of my uncle, and the painful anticipation that filled the interstitial space between here and gone. I wrote the verses six months later in the freezing cold on my way home from my studio in the industrial part of our neighborhood. I sang this song to my aunt years later as she was dying. We both cried." 

Seemingly held together by a frayed thread, the track carries a palpable tension, conjured in no small part by the feeling like it might all collapse in on itself at any moment. Which, in its final, bruised few moments it does. Sometimes it has to, sometimes it should.

Leonor Arnaut - Avé, Raposa

Shimmering under a different mood, and freshly released today, 'Avé, Raposa' is the new single from Copenhagen-based, Portuguese artist Leonor Arnaut. It too swirls with melancholy, but the temperature is different here. Sung in her native Portuguese language means that the song's sentiments will be hidden from some of us, but the music itself hints at things deliberately said and un-said.

Regardless of that distance, Arnaut's voice is a thing of wonder. Sometimes dancing alongside the synths that ripple through the track, the percussion that underpins it all, it also finds enough in itself to occasionally rise above it all to make beautiful shapes of its own.

Both an intimate and intriguing reveal, 'Ave, Raposa' is Leonor's second single and hints at great things beyond. It's released today, via the Lisbon-based label CANTO.

Thank you for reading and listening and being right here.