Skullcrusher – Dragon

Skullcrusher recently announced her highly anticipated new album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, due out October 17th via her new label home Dirty Hit.

Today, Helen Ballentine has shared the album’s third single “Dragon,” a gorgeous, murky pop song that lets piano echo over tight, gritted percussion.

Alongside the single, she’s announced an intimate show at New York’s Night Club 101 on Oct 6th.

Ballentine explains she wrote the song “while thinking about dissociation and how it can feel to be brought back to the ground from this state. Like in ‘Spirited Away’ when Chihiro begins to disappear in the spirit world she touches Haku’s hand, which pulls her back but then she can’t move her legs. It is a heavy thing to feel the weight of living and pull yourself back to earth. I was interested in the idea of this being a heavy burden but also a necessary aspect of living. It is hopeful but scary as well. Similar to the way armor is a protection but also a burden, either physically or mentally. It’s difficult to protect yourself.”

Recorded over a period of years following the release of her celebrated 2022 debut, Quiet the Room, And Your Song is Like a Circle does not capture experience – 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, Circle probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as what’s been lost.

Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she’d called home for nearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New York’s 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’s first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domestic space, Circle finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes.

Lead single “Exhale” is built around gorgeous vocal filigrees that fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. Watch the video for “Exhale” 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.

Opening track and previous single “March,” is a stark piano reverie laced with flickering electronics and ambient layers.

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