Tag Archives: Widowspeak

Fresh Juice

Fresh Juice 22nd June 2026

The Delines – Dilaudid Diane

This features on one of the most quietly enduring albums I have heard this year, The Delines latest ‘The Set Up.’ This is the kind of slow‑burn storytelling only they can pull off, a late‑night vignette steeped in motel‑lamp melancholy and the ache of someone trying to outrun their own history. Amy Boone sings it like she is reading a note left on a bedside table, her voice worn but unwavering, while the band moves with that trademark Delines hush, stripped back to an old pub piano here and ensemble backing singing. It is a character study delivered in half‑shadows, for the full cinematic experience you can get the album here: https://amzn.to/4w64jMP

Alex Amen – Diamonds

This laid back dose of sun drenched, hazy day country is from Alex Amen’s debut album ‘Sun of Amen’ which was released earlier this month. This is built on warm, unhurried production and a vocal delivery that feels both intimate and resolute, as if he is sifting through the pieces of a life that he is finally ready to name. The song moves with a reflective pulse, very tender, clear‑eyed, and edged with just enough grit, marking Amen as a songwriter to keep an ear out for going forwards. You can buy the album via this link: https://amzn.to/4eD4GqQ

The Limiñanas – One Blood Circle

This one is taken from the bands first live album, recorded at the Centre Pompidou during Because Beaubourg (October 24th, 2025) and was released at the end of last week. The Limiñanas have spent the past decade carving out their own corner of the psych‑garage universe, theirs is a world of motorik grooves, noirish melodies, and sun‑bleached French cool. This latest release captures their live atmosphere in full, unfiltered form. Long known for the cinematic sweep of their studio work, their full onstage incarnation feels rawer and more propulsive, all fuzz‑bass swagger and hypnotic repetition. A physical copy of the album can be purchased via this link: https://amzn.to/4vo92Jx

Meredith Moon – Sapphire Blue

This is one of many wonderful tracks available on the latest Meredith Moon album, released earlier this year, ‘From Here To The Sea.’ The songwriter leans into her gift for intimate, unhurried storytelling here, tracing a mood rather than a narrative; the kind of reflective, salt tinged folk that seems to gather its power from open water and long memory. Her voice moves with a gentle resolve, carried by fingerpicked patterns that shimmer like light on the surface, making ‘Sapphire Blue’ one of the record’s most arresting moments. The album can be purchased via this link: https://amzn.to/3QCSe2v

Widowspeak – No Driver

This is a track that sits on ‘Roses,’ Widowspeak’s new album release for Captured Tracks, like a slow exhale. This is a song that drifts in on dusky guitars and that familiar, half‑lit sense of longing they can do better than almost anyone. Molly Hamilton sings with a kind of weightless clarity, tracing the feeling of moving through life on instinct rather than direction, while the arrangement blooms in subtle, shimmering layers. This is one of those Widowspeak tracks where the atmosphere does as much storytelling as the lyrics, all soft edges, open roads, and an aching that lingers. The new album is available through this link: https://amzn.to/4vmXh65

Tomorrow Woman – The Flower

To close this week we have a scorching offering of electro pop taken from the new Tomorrow Woman EP ‘Plays Machines.’ Tomorrow Woman is the project of Betsy Roszko, a California‑born, Paris‑based artist whose work blends electronic introspection with a strong DIY ethos. The project marks her return to releasing music after a seven‑year hiatus, following earlier work with the punk band Gomme. With Tomorrow Woman, Roszko shifts into a more electronic, dance‑oriented palette while carrying over punk’s instinct for disruption and emotional directness. You can get a copy of the EP via this link: https://tomorrowwoman.bandcamp.com/

Standard
Old Fruit

Old Fruit 17th October 2025

Deradoorian – A Beautiful Woman

This week’s vintage selection of tunes jumps back exactly ten years this month and re-investigates some of the new music Fruit Tree Records was getting excited about in October 2015. Top of the pile back then was this debut release by a former member of the Dirty Projectors. Working under the solo name Deradoorian, this genre surfing experimental art-rock artist had released her first album ‘The Expanding Flower Planet’ and, just as that title was a self-proclaimed attempt to represent “the expansion of consciousness”, so too did the music display a bold visionary leap into the realms of multi-layered exploration and spiritual open minded release. The hypnotising opening track is performed live here in a stunning video highlighting the artists sense of sonic purpose and clever mix of technology and soul.

John Howard & The Night Mail – Intact & Smiling

It wasn’t all just young sonic space cadets making the most musically satisfying sounds this month a decade ago. I was also thrilled by a new release from the legendary Pretty Things as well as this slice of late (two decades late) period Britpop from John Howard. His career had begun in the seventies with the debut album ‘Kid In A Big World’ on CBS being regarded as a bit of a cult classic. This track from the then new album with the Night Mail was released on Tapete Records and it sat well in the catalogue of a label known for its support of artists crafting intelligent pop and song writing. Having at one time retired from performing, the album was a key part of his second act and he continues to release new music to this day.

Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats – S.O.B.

The opening pair of tunes this week were top drawer musically but they remained decidedly underground in 2015. This one on the other hand was a major breakthrough for the artist and enjoyed some major exposure on mainstream TV (as seen in this Jools Holland clip here but the big one for Nathaniel in 2015 was probably his Jimmy Fallon performance of the song) as well as numerous commercials and TV shows including ‘Fargo’, ‘Brockmire’ and ‘Two Doors Down’. It also represented a significant shift stylistically for Nathaniel whose previous work had leaned into more of a folk style but here, on his bands full length debut, they grabbed this gospel referencing soulful groove with both hands and ran with it to memorable, shoe-shuffling effect.

Widowspeak – All Yours

This dreamy dose of Americana sounds like a cross between Mazzy Star and The Cranberries which is no bad thing. Widowspeak are a duo comprising Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas and this was a tune featured on their third album ‘Captured Tracks’ released in 2015 representing a shift in their creative process towards a more organic style of writing and playing. They managed to exude both an intimacy and a grand expressiveness with their sound; the former is clear enough in the emotive manner Molly brings to the reflective lyric but the latter is evident too in the depth of the sound and those echoes of vintage rock ‘n’ roll heard in the sumptuously twanging guitar.

La Luz – You Disappear

It is no surprise upon returning to this track to recognise that La Luz and their main woman Shana Cleveland have become firm Fruit Tree Records favourites over the last ten years. Everything I rate about the bands sound was already on display here, those heavy sunset sonics in the keys and melodies combined with the organic rough edges of their garage band aesthetic. They were also writing some damn fine pop songs which appeared on the second La Luz album ‘Weirdo Shrine’ that year, a record that undoubtedly found the right producer in the shape of 21st century garage rock king Ty Segall. If you haven’t woken up to them already, then just ride the waves of those surf-sounding guitars and let this sensational band take you there.

Timo Lassy – Hip Or Not

It was not just acts with garage band sensibilities summoning up the echoes of sixties vintage music in 2015. This track has all the elements of a funk-infused sixties Blue Note jazz classic waiting to be heard in its grooves. ‘Hip Or Not’ is from the album ‘Love Bullet’ released by the Finnish saxophonist Timo Lassy and whilst it does conjure thoughts of a golden era, it can also claim to possess a timelessness and true class in the production. This was Lassy’s fifth studio album and it was to be a record he regarded as a reaction to a few colourful years of his life, which maybe accounts for the inviting intimacy of the music in tandem with its infectious warm grooving. This one, as have the other selections this week, has been a welcome resurrection and is ripe for rediscovery, so dig in.

Standard