Every Monday, 88Nine music director Erin Wolf shares a sonic gem she found using her nearly 20 years of new-music exploration experience. You can hear all her discoveries at 2 p.m. every Sunday on What’s All This: Adventures in New Music.
Texas-based indie folk trio LOMA’s newest song is trepidatiously sounding folky trip-hop constructed with wiry guitar pluckings, soft brushings, clarinet, violin and an overall feeling of unease. If the sound of a creaky door popped into the mix, it wouldn’t be too out of left field in “Pink Sky.”
This might all sound unnerving, but trust that it’s delightfully absorbing to get lost in. It feels as though the Lone Star State band packed up some of the environmental nuances of their travels and brought them to a studio in England to lay down their newest tracks. The immediate sound is at once detached and intimate, evoking feelings of being at home as a band while making music, even while being abroad.
LOMA’s forthcoming album — How Will I Live Without a Body? — echoes this and centers around themes of partnership, loss, regeneration and fighting a sense that “we’re all in this alone,” the band said.
“This mischievous little song was a late addition to the album,” they added. “We recorded it in a chilly, whitewashed room in southern England, and we didn’t have many instruments to work with at first — just a nylon string guitar, a two-piece drum set, a Casio keyboard and a clarinet. But we liked the challenge.”
Even with spare instrumentation, “Pink Sky” offers an enveloping, atmospheric listening experience. Look for LOMA’s full album out June 26 on Sub Pop Records, but in the meantime you can listen to “Pink Sky” and all the new songs from this episode using the show’s Spotify playlist. Then be sure to check out a fresh batch of tunes on What’s All This at 2 p.m. Sundays on 88Nine.
Episode playlist
- Islands, “The End”
- Lunchbox, “Dinner for Two”
- Acoqui, “Fibers & Graves”
- meija, “SEVEN (ft. Hand Habits)”
- Tenci, “Bubblegum”
- Tasha, “Michigan”
- Crack Cloud, “Blue Kite”
- TR/ST, “Soon”
- The WAEVE, “City Lights”
- Loma, “Pink Sky”
- Wu-Lu, “Blunted Strings”
- Billie Eilish, “THE DINER”
- Shellac, “Scabby the Rat”
