Northern Spy

Necks: Bleed [CD]

Counting Sunsets is a quietly expansive continuation of SUSS's slow-motion Americana, tracing new lines through the terrain they've been mapping across their run of albums for Northern Spy. As with earlier releases, the band leans into wide-open desert horizons, kosmische drift, and noir-ish pedal-steel laments, but this time an end-of-day stillness permeates. Counting Sunsets feels episodic and reflective: a sequence of small, neon-glowing moments that pass like light changing at dusk. Each piece arrives with the calm assurance of a band attuned to negative space, tone, decay, atmosphere, and melody. A quiet preoccupation with memory and the slow erosion of time. Light fades and the air carries sound.

Necks: Disquiet 2025 [Digipack / 3 CD]

Having composed for both film and television over his 20 plus album career to date, Gary Lucas turns towards some of his favorite film music composers here with a solo album, all arranged and performed (except for one piece) for solo guitar, without overdubs. "Since 2009, world-class guitarist Gary Lucas has played a live (and mostly improvised) score...often to sold-out venues around the world...You may know of the Grammy-nominated guitarist and songwriter, who co-managed and collaborated with Captain Beefheart in the 1970s and worked with Leonard Bernstein, Nick Cave, and Lou Reed. Lucas' New York band Gods and Monsters included then-little-known Jeff Buckley, with whom Lucas co-wrote a few songs on the late singer's only studio album, 1994's classic Grace. Lucas premiered the Dracula live soundtrack in Havana, and has even taken the show to just outside a castle in Transylvania." - LA WEEKLY

In October 2020, Brooklyn, NY based singer-songwriter Allegra Krieger drove across the country to record her new album with Luke Temple. Set to release on March 4 with Northern Spy, Precious Thing captures fleeting moments in a world that has become sick from itself. From sharing a gaze with a man as the clock strikes 12 on New Year's on a Coney Island-bound train, to taking a loved one off of life support, to processing the religious trauma of wine, Krieger weaves together a portrait of a woman trying to find meaning. Accompanied by guitars, bowed strings, and piano, this is an album about looking, and Krieger fills up each lonely space she enters with her gaze. Krieger asks you to look, to really, really look, so that you can remember something, however small it is, when it's all gone.

The first proper solo release by guitarist Jenks Miller, of psych-metal band Horseback (Relapse) and alt-country outfit Mount Moriah (Merge) sees him applying his distinctive minimalist approach and signature tone to a more experimental canvas. Spirit Signal consists of 6 ambient guitar compositions, incorporating feedback, drone, plenty of overdrive-laden licks, and on the albums epic twenty minute closer, some darkly enigmatic vocals.

Suss: Ghost Box (Expanded) [CD]