Skullcrusher Quiet The Room

Helen Ballentine's spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Roomis the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across thesefourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawlsout. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects thejourneys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves inorder to show up for the world. While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drewinspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she setout 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 andpresent merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elementsof fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound thatfeels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse ofcopper corroding. To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock,Ballentine and her partner and collaborator Noah Weinman brought inproducer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate NewYork, close to where Ballentine grew up. "We wanted every song to havethat little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling," she says. These songsthrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace,as on lead single "Whatever Fits Together," which chugs to a raggedstart before the gears catch and ease. On "It's Like a Secret," Ballentinestruggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can everfully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to crossa 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 andfloors of my room," she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony. As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we benda giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine hascreated. 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 throughthese private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliestmemories, widening the frame for us-even opening a window.