Skullcrusher - Quiet The Room, Cloudy White

Helen Ballentine's spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Room

is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these

fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls

out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the

journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in

order to show up for the world.

While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew

inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set

out 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 and

present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements

of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that

feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of

copper corroding.

To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock,

Ballentine and her partner and collaborator Noah Weinman brought in

producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New

York, close to where Ballentine grew up. "We wanted every song to have

that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling," she says. These songs

thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace,

as on lead single "Whatever Fits Together," which chugs to a ragged

start before the gears catch and ease. On "It's Like a Secret," Ballentine

struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever

fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross

a 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 and

floors of my room," she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.

As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend

a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has

created. 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 through

these private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliest

memories, widening the frame for us-even opening a window.