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| Photo - Bertine Monsen |
Norwegian alt-pop auteur Iris Caltwait just released her extraordinary new album 'Again, for the first time', out now via 777 Music. To celebrate the album release, Iris Caltwait plays a London headline next week (12 November) before playing select EU and Norwegian headline dates in 2026.
A vivid, slow-burning, shape-shifting odyssey through grief, rage and renewal, the album features immersive, spacious production from Askjell (Sigrid, Aurora) and contributions from Vetle Junker, Jimi Somewhere, Milo Orchis, Lauritz Christiansen and more.
Across its sixteen tracks and 46 minute runtime, Iris Caltwait (real name Vilde Iris Hartveit Kolltveit) delivers a masterstroke of nuanced pop and emotional excavation. Written between Bergen, Oslo, Copenhagen and Gothenburg in borrowed living rooms and countryside retreats, the album captures the quiet reckoning that follows rupture, tracing the process of rebuilding herself, piece by piece - drawing influence from artists like Mitski, Adrianne Lenker, and Saya Gray.
“A lot of the songs are about trying to reconnect to the child I was and to the person I want to be,” Iris says. “When I was little, I wasn’t afraid to get angry. Now I’ve had to relearn getting mad, and reconnect with indignation.”
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| Photo - white images |
“Unholy Hours” was written between the years 2020 and 2023. I write music very sporadically and I only really write when I'm feeling inspired enough to do so. We are now in the year 2025 and we grow as artists though these songs reflect this period in my life. These songs are quite sentimental to me with stories of friendship, heartbreak, addiction and all moments in between.
“Unholy Hours” was recorded between October 2023 - May 2024 in mostly random sessions in my 1993 Mazda e2000 Van, Dusty Headquarters which at the time was a small storage unit, and some vocals and bass guitar at The Diesel Gypsies rehearsal space all in Airlie Beach, Queensland. The Acoustic Drum Kit in all songs was performed by Racso (Oscar Howie) recorded in David Pendragon’s “The Studio” in Canberra, ACT, Australia.
As a DIY artist for many years I can safely say this has been my most ambitious and most difficult project. I went about producing this album quite unconventionally, mostly captured through an old Presonus interface into a 2017 Macbook Air. Thus causing many headaches along the way, I spent easily 100s of hours doing everything forwards, backwards and sideways in my own “unique” way. From tediously bouncing every individual track from garageband to get professionally mixed and mastered. To overdubbing countless unnecessary tracks, to late nights up till 5 am sometimes tracking, or bouncing and uploading files.
"This album could have easily resulted in the breakdown of any relationship. Thank goodness I'm not married, but yeah here it is I hope you like it." - Dave Helgi Johan.
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| Photo - Valerie Fremin |
Terry Klein writes songs and sings them for people and makes records and drives around in his 2015 Toyota Venza and plays a lot of shows. The Austin American-Statesman calls him “one of Austin's top singer-songwriters in recent years.” Terry Klein’s latest record, Hill Country Folk Music starts and finishes with two distinct versions of the song “Try”, in which the narrator, inspired by the beauty around him vows to “do better” or at the very least try, something we can be striving to achieve. Backed by an undeniably cool groove, “I Used to Be Cool”, is an ode to Austin, Texas where Terry lives, that easily becomes any place, person or bygone time that needs a reminder that they are in fact still cool.
Written after hearing that his friend and Illinois cult hero, Dana Anderson, had taken his own life, the song, “If You Go” examines the tragedy of suicide from the perspective of a surviving loved one. Klein sings, “You’re loved, you’re loved, you’re loved, someone’s gonna miss you if you go”, a universal truth that we all need to hear at points in our lives.
Later the mood of much of our country and society as a whole is captured through the story of a veteran and store owner in a small town in “Hopelessness is Going Around”. Other highlights on the album include “The Dirty Third”, a perfect marriage of sonic landscape and lyrical brilliance featuring Mike Compton on mandolin and “My Next Birthday”, a gorgeous and gut-wrenching account of coming to terms with one’s mortality.
Hill Country Folk Music was recorded in a controlled frenzy over just a few days in Nashville, with acclaimed producer Thomm Jutz. It is Klein’s fifth studio album overall and third that he’s made with Jutz.
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Since the release of the 2021 album Hopeless Romantic, Canadian alt-country artist Bobby Dove has made a lot of fans around the world. Dove is finally poised to follow up Hopeless Romantic, with the latest preview of the as-yet-untitled new album coming in the form of “Trans Canadian Blues,” an ode to touring the country’s vast expanses, delivered in a hard-charging style that would surely put a smile on Waylon Jennings’s face.
Produced in Toronto by Aaron Goldstein (Cowboy Junkies, Kathleen Edwards, Juliana Riolino) with the help of a crack band featuring guitarist Nichol Robertson, drummer Dani Nash and pedal steel guitarist Burke Carroll, “Trans Canadian Blues” will leave listeners salivating for more of Dove’s new material, which includes a co-write/duet with Grammy Award-winning singer/songwriter Jim Lauderdale.
Delving into the inspiration behind the song, Dove says, “I was just off the road from an east-to-west Canadian tour and I was feeling ragged but restless. I think I was actually drinking alone when I started writing the verses, and it led to creating a little story about what it's like to push on from either end of this country, alone in a car with hours to lose your mind between great distances. I wanted to express—with a sense of humour—what might have been some of my less dazzling moments as a touring trans-person with a honky tonk mind, and perseverance in the face of it all.”
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New York based indie alt-folk singer songwriter Amy Jay's songs are like plastic knives — pliable, yet cutting. Throughout the 10 songs on her new album, Mnemonics, Jay proves she knows how to wield them tenaciously.
Titled to represent the mnemonic devices she birthed while “writing my inner monologue” during and outside of therapy sessions, these little mantras help Jay with the work-in-progress of the human condition. Struggling to find her place in the city's messy music scene (iykyk) over the last few years, she found herself slipping into bad habits and decided to take control of everything she could — herself.
Throughout Mnemonics, Jay explores what makes the vulnerable acceptable, as well as the Joycean concept of what makes the universal specific: How do you love yourself when you don't feel likable? How do you face pieces of your hidden self courageously? How do you hold space for negative thought patterns or feelings of embarrassment, insecurity, loneliness, or anxiety?
While such themes are often still stigmatized, through song, they become softer and more palatable. Jay assembled a crew of stellar local musicians with national track records to help take her sketches of folk songs into fully formed indie rock panoramas. With long-time producer/engineer Jon Seale (Mason Jar Music) at the helm and guitarist Sam Skinner (Pinegrove, Fenne Lily), keyboardist Andrew Freedman (Michael Mayo, Ryan Beatty), Jay also enlisted bassists Jeremy McDonald and Margaux (Katy Kirby) and drummers Jason Burger (Big Thief) and Jordan Rose (Maggie Rogers) to round out her sound.
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