In our jagged history of popular song, this is one of those things that avid online crate diggers like me weave our waking dreams from: a project with both clear roots in a loner folk lineage of decades past and a deadset mission to sidestep any sense of tradition in form or function, released into relative obscurity (in this case, to Bandcamp and YouTube) and snagged by the algorithm to attract the attention of indie-folk heavyweights and earn the record a full-on official release with label-of-the-moment AD 93. It sounds like something I’d invent to bolster my own faith, and yet, these are the details that those in the DIY know have regurgitated and marveled over since the March 2026 re-release of Brooklyn musician Dagmar Zuniga’s in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music. Recorded over the course of five years in three different locations on her Tascam 424 machine and originally shared online in January 2025, it’s garnered fewer comparisons to the indie singer-songwriter stalwarts you might have in mind with that initial pitch, and instead more to experimental one-offs remixing and rewiring the carousel of time: Grouper, Cindy Lee, fellow New Yorker Anastasia Coope, The Microphones—artists who float above our understanding of time and location, suspended permanently in air.
The first point of comparison that hit me upon hearing in filth your mystery’s opening track, “Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion” (the first of two main versions that crop up throughout the tracklist, delivered here as a folk ballad helmed by an acoustic guitar and flute), was roving British folk singer Vashti Bunyan’s now-venerated 1970 cult record Just Another Diamond Day. Other elusive folk nuggets made by women 50 years ago—gossamer voices whispering fairy stories ‘till they’re real, often sweet and homespun—by the likes of Linda Perhacs and Bridget St. John have also been batted around by those in search of something to peg the indescribable to. Yet, I’ve settled on the record’s closest spiritual cousin being another record from that same year, which Zuniga herself has cited as an influence: ex-Pink Floyd ringleader Syd Barrett’s debut record, The Madcap Laughs.
Though not quite analogous with the sound of Zuniga’s unorthodox recording methods, so key to what sets her record apart, Barrett’s often sweet and ever-unraveling debut is similarly dependent on the peculiarities of its form, rather than its content. For his former bandmates recording him in Abbey Road Studios, what should have been an album of straightforward psychedelic pop ditties quickly became a portrait of an artist’s mental condition worsening. Songs like “Terrapin” or “Dark Globe” are submerged into a dark haze, fractured into pieces, shattered solely by the delivery of their songwriter. It excavates both the beauty and the terrors of its creator, and what initially spelled disaster for the production is now considered a defining feature.
Zuniga, too, courts the strange in a formal sense, both in the way the songs have been recorded and in the interest of picking apart and repurposing each track over the course of the record’s runtime. The result arrives more as a piece of outsider art than it does a contemporary folk album—lyrically inscrutable, putting what feel like centuries-old devotional songs to tape, reworking and re-ordering the lines scribed into scripture as if documenting the sound of something’s mythology being born. At times, the variations of different musical ideas repeated will tremble under their own hymnal weight, letting hummed vocals by Zuniga’s daughter clash against a spectral organ run, only for the whole thing to collapse beneath the static fuzz clouding the mix. This disruption, of course, is a central feature.
What emerges, then, plays like a haunted transmission from beyond the physical world as much as it does an ethnographic document. Insight into Zuniga’s musical north stars come not from confessional lyrics, but the effort and experimentation audible in each track—like the sound of a traveler committed to tape, unsettling and joyously inventive in the ways it works within and against its analog constraints. Each appearance of a musical motif, like the melodic callbacks to “Even God Gets Stuck in Devotion” at different points in its runtime, works by its own logic in Zuniga’s beautifully handmade mutation.
The second, piano-driven version of that track, featuring Zach Phillips of Fievel Is Glauque, further cloaks it in an eerie sweetness, rendering it even more cryptic in its double-timed lilt: “When I see you / You can’t see me / So that / We are one shadow.” A similar trick is employed between “Plenty For All The Masses” and “Plenty (For All of Life’s Messes),” the former of which relies on the space placed between the listener and what sounds like a cult gathering of harmonizing voices, as the latter puts Zuniga’s voice and guitar directly in your ear, casting her own compositions as art pieces that shapeshift based on the context surrounding them.
The wordless sound experiments too, like the crackling, overprocessed keyboard drone of closer “To Live Happily” or the warbling, tape-hiss-drenched “LN60: Jupiter opposite Jupiter,” sound like an artist seeking something beyond herself, baking the strain of its making into the finished product—or rather, finished until a melody appears again in a subsequent track. When “Garden” cuts out just 90 seconds in, it may well have happened organically, enforcing the listener’s suspicion that we are hearing something excavated from a place beyond us, perhaps not meant to be heard by our ears.
Though the record’s framework means that distinctive textures often come at the cost of decipherable lyrics, this only sets more straightforward songwriting starkly against the referential song cycle connecting many of the other in filth your mystery tracks. Perhaps the clearest example of this comes in “A Car With No Lights On,” a song which appears in the tracklisting’s final stretch, as if to bury it. After sifting through the layers of physical effort for track after track, its minimal singalong warning of a malevolent force feels like a premonition from beyond (“And his eyes are / Like a car with no lights on / Driving around all night long / Pretend you cannot see him / Though you will know when he’s seen you”), further spinning the record’s mythology before coming to an abrupt stop and never appearing again—as if she’s decided the warning can take no other shape. Even in Zuniga’s evolving book of song, some things must remain immovable. It’s a stunning highlight, all the same.
Maybe “premonition” is the word that strikes closest to what in filth your mystery sets out to achieve in the first place: capturing the mystical pursuit of the divine in song, only to expose the fear of it slipping through your fingers as you work to mold it into something worthy of its message. The result, as challenging as it may be for the casual listener, leaves us with a work begging to be revisited, dissected, studied as it waves desperately for salvation beyond us. In an increasingly confessional but safe musical landscape—where everyone can spell out their terrors in poetic lines but can’t make us feel anything in the performance or production—it’s a gift to investigate anything this confounding. May its terror and beauty alike send us floating untethered for as many re-listens as it takes to understand, suspending us over the sound of a mythology being born. It’s not every day these dreams find us waking, you know. [AD 93]
Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.
