Album Review: Skullcrusher, And Your Song Is Like A Circle

Skullcrusher’s sophomore album, And Your Song Is Like A Circle, is a haunting meditation on the ephemeral nature of experience.

From the opening track, ‘March’, Skullcrusher – aka Helen Ballentine – weaves delicate vocal filigrees around lush synths and fragile keys, creating a sense of emotional vastness that both envelops and unsettles. The music offers a slow drift through memory: moments appearing and fading, like moths fluttering in and out of focus.

Throughout And Your Song Is Like A Circle, Skullcrusher probes the interiority of loss. Tracks like ‘Living’ and ‘Exhale’ unfold with a crystalline clarity, while ‘Maelstrom’ and ‘Changes’ embrace atmospheric indie-rock textures that shimmer and waver, blurring the boundary between human vulnerability and technological abstraction.

The production reveals Ballentine’s willingness to experiment, from intimate throat-contact microphone vocals, to layered soundscapes that feel both personal and otherworldly. There’s a fragile beauty in how these songs linger, capturing moments of grief and longing: the music itself is a circle, endlessly turning yet never closing.

Recalling the windswept beauty of artists like Grouper, Bon Iver and Julia Holter, And Your Song Is Like A Circle is a stunning evolution, a record that doesn’t simply capture experience, but gestures toward the imprint it leaves behind.

Out now.