Helen – Linda's Head

Linda's Head is the first new album in over a decade by the Pacific Northwest trio of Liz Harris (guitar, vocals), Scott Simmons (bass), and Jed Bindeman (drums). Like it's predecessor, 2015's The Original Faces, the album maps a uniquely intimate and potent vision of bedroom dream pop. Theirs is a shoegaze of half-light and silhouettes, attuned to the shadowplay of melody, melancholy, and undertow.The record's title is a refraction of meanings: a head in the clouds, a severance, a fictitious landform jutting into the sea. The music is similarly layered, both yearning and weathered, it's edges blurred by years in the wild. Lyrics of waves, storms, and escape further shade the songs in subcurrents of desperation and beauty, tinged in the palette of the New Zealand pop underground. But at it's core Helen's chemistry is one of warmth and release, powered by the kinship of old friends in dark times.