Quiet the Room, by Skullcrusher

Quiet the Room

by Skullcrusher

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yourcolleague it'd be nicer if pop music sounded more like this.
A friend introduced me to this album because of the sound-collage surrounding its folk-flair.
The themes make me want to read Jean Boudrillard's System of Objects again. Favorite track: You are my House.

indianadixon Helen won over our hearts with her self-titled Skullcrusher, but where her first record is a cozy mulled wine, Quiet the Room is the finely aged wine of the Skullcrusher mythos. Brilliant direction and production, hauntingly beautiful. Favorite track: It's Like a Secret.

Mister Meows Shoegaze, but not. A bath of atmosphere and voice

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Skullcrusher - Quiet the Room on Limited Edition Pink Glass Translucent Vinyl

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
Skullcrusher - Quiet the Room on Black Gatefold Vinyl

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Download available in 24-bit/96kHz.

ships out within 5 days

Purchasable with gift card

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Skullcrusher - Quiet the Room on CD

Includes unlimited streaming of Quiet the Room via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
Download available in 24-bit/96kHz.

ships out within 5 days

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Quiet the Room / Tea Towel
Other Apparel
Skullcrusher - Quiet the Room Limited Edition Tea Towel

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1.	They Quiet the Room 03:33	buy track
2.	Building a Swing 03:36	buy track
3.	Whatever Fits Together 03:45	buy track
4.	Whistle of the Dead 01:19	buy track
5.	Lullaby in February 04:35	buy track
6.	Pass Through Me 02:24	buy track
7.	Could it be the way I look at everything? 00:37	buy track
8.	Outside, playing 02:08	buy track
9.	It's Like a Secret 03:26	buy track
10.	Sticker 04:11	buy track
11.	Window Somewhere 04:25	buy track
12.	(secret instrumental) 01:19	buy track
13.	Quiet the Room 03:24	buy track
14.	You are my House 03:08	buy track

about

Helen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Room is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in order to show up for the world.

While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set out to capture on Quiet the Room was not the innocence of childhood, as it is so often portrayed, but the intense complexity of it. Past and present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of copper corroding.

To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock, Ballentine and her collaborator Noah Weinman brought in producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New York, close to where Ballentine grew up. “We wanted every song to have that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling,” she says. These songs thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace, as on lead single “Whatever Fits Together,” which chugs to a ragged start before the gears catch and ease. On “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross a barrier and leave a part of ourselves behind. And yet, on closing track “You are my House,” she finds a way to reach out. “You are the walls and floors of my room,” she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.

As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has created. Like a kid constructing a shelter in a patch of sharp brambles, she reminds us that beauty and terror can exist in the same place. The complexities of childhood are so often overlooked, but through these private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliest memories, widening the frame for us—even opening a window.

credits

released October 14, 2022

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Skullcrusher Los Angeles, California

Crossing over the barrier I go inside for dinner
~
Then to the piano
and back again
~
Still there, you see me through a window.

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