runo plum – Pond

In November, runo plum will release her debut LP on Winspear (Wishy, Slow Pulp, Teethe). Entitled patching, the album was produced with her new Winspear labelmate Lutalo, and was announced in late August with the single “Sickness,” and was followed by “Halfway Up The Lawn.”

In November, runo will embark on a UK/EU tour that includes appearances at Pitchfork London and Paris, and today she is announcing a run of US dates for 2026, and sharing the new single “Pond.”

runo says of the track:

“This song came from feeling really stuck in a slump, feeling the height of the absence, the pain, and the loneliness. Wondering how there will ever be a time where it didn’t feel like this, and fighting with the internal voice that was telling me my best option was to not be on earth. Sonically this song is pretty mellow, but the fuzz guitar that comes in at the instrumental is a great representation of the internal horror that was happening inside of me.”

On patching, runo plum isn’t just healing, she’s transforming. The intimate debut LP from the Minneapolis-based singer and songwriter gracefully captures the contraction, expansion and release of an intense period of emotional repair, in soft-edged, radiating indie rock. Inspired by a breakup and subsequent healing process, patching is a sonic journey as much as an emotional one. Whether it be longing for friendship, social anxiety, hypochondria spirals, or coming home to a box of stuff from your ex, the album oscillates from rumination to little glimmers of joy to closure and eventually, falling in love all over again.

Each song on patching shifts and prods the same tender center, deftly working to soothe and mend the aches of lost love and anxiety. It’s those gentle moments of reckoning and renewal that form the throughline of patching, with runo’s warm voice and candid lyricism at the helm, acting as a kind of homegrown salve. In these moments of healing comes a crystalline clarity–that patching oneself isn’t only about fixing something–it’s a catalysing act of creation, not so different from the genesis of runo’s painted butterfly on the album’s cover.

In a process enlivened by synchronicities, growth and full circle moments, runo set out to record patching, bringing a handful of new collaborators into the fold and mixing studio-captured performances with bedroom vocal overdubs that harken an earlier era of runo’s music. Lutalo, the Minnesota-born, Vermont-based musician and producer fresh off the release of their acclaimed debut The Academy, signed on to produce the album after meeting runo almost a decade ago. An early collaboration between the two sparked the lyrical core of runo’s 2021 single “yin to yang,” and bringing Lutalo onto the project marked another moment of alignment and natural expansion for runo.

Together with collaborator, instrumentalist and girlfriend Noa Francis, runo and Lutalo recorded the album in a cabin in rural Vermont over the course of two weeks. Centering the honeyed, time-worn timbre of a centenarian acoustic guitar and the easeful warmth of runo’s voice, the trio began putting together the pieces one by one. “It was just flowing,” runo says. “Every song is an emotional fragment during my healing process patched together into one project, while I was also patching myself together in real time. You can feel the damage, but also the repair. The slowing down in order to move forward, and the dreaming of a time where I’m finally free from the dread.”

On patching, the work of metamorphosis plays as large of a role as the studied process of mending and repair. Across its twelve tracks, runo paints her melodic arcs with a sharp sense of dynamics, crafting songs that capture both the hazy highs and the dark blue lows of all the natural cycles that make the world turn. At the heart of her writing lies a sort of ephemeral magic, one born from her ability to alchemize a deeply formative chapter of life into a vivid scrapbook of songs, capturing the contours of her experiences in shimmering detail.

A lush debut statement born from precarity and uncertainty, patching is filled with these artful flips—rich sonic moments to balance out emotional vacancies, creating expansion from an ending. It’s only the first few pages in the new chapter of what’s to come from runo plum, whose burgeoning voice as a performer and songwriter are sure to flourish as she enters this expansive new chapter, continuing to examine heartache and renewal with her lucid pen and tender heart.

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