{"id":276013,"date":"2025-07-23T14:36:43","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T18:36:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/livemusicblog.com\/?p=276013"},"modified":"2025-08-08T14:36:04","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T18:36:04","slug":"skullcrusher-and-your-song-is-like-a-circle-album","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/livemusicblog.com\/folk\/singer-songwriter\/skullcrusher-and-your-song-is-like-a-circle-album\/","title":{"rendered":"“Exhale”: Skullcrusher Unveils Lead Single from Upcoming Album"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Skullcrusher<\/b> has announced her highly anticipated new album, <\/span>And Your Song is Like a Circle<\/em><\/a>, due out <\/span>October 17th<\/b> via her new label home <\/span>Dirty Hit<\/b>. Lead single \u201c<\/span>Exhale<\/b><\/a>\u201d is built around gorgeous vocal filigrees that fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cExhale is about noticing the moment when a song is first conceived,\u201d shares <\/span>Helen Ballentine. <\/b>\u201cThere is a part of me that wants to stop there and leave the song unfinished, before structure settles in and the song evolves. Instead, I allow it to form & accept whatever it may become. This process feels natural, like taking a pause at the top of your inhale before letting it all out. Maybe through acknowledging this process I can feel more at peace with change in general. When thoughts, words & sounds interact in a certain way they can reveal a path forward. Sometimes I want to linger before this path, in a space that feels hidden and safe, but in the end I take the path & surrender to change.\u201d Read more about the record in today\u2019s profile with <\/span>The FADER<\/b><\/a>, who said her<\/span> \u201cskill as a songwriter is adding gravitas to the most conceptual of ideas or, as she does on the album\u2019s meta first single \u201cExhale,\u201d pull into focus the act of writing a song in the first place.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recorded over a period of years following the release of her celebrated 2022 debut, <\/span>Quiet the Room<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>And Your Song is Like a Circle<\/span><\/i> does not capture experience \u2013 it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable. Swaying between elegant folk and crystalline electronics, landing somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, <\/span>Circle <\/span><\/i>probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as what’s been lost.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she\u2019d called home for nearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New York\u2019s Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks. If Skullcrusher\u2019s first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domestic space, <\/span>Circle<\/span><\/i> finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch the video for \u201c<\/span>Exhale<\/span><\/a>\u201d below, which was conceptualised by Ballentine in collaboration with director Adam Alonzo and shot in Upstate New York in and around her mother’s house.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch Official Video for “Exhale:<\/p>\n\n\n

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Skullcrusher - Exhale (Official Music Video)<\/div><\/div>
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