The New-York based artist doesn’t trade in thrash metal. There are no shredding guitars or double-kicks anywhere in sight. Helen Ballentine’s music is haunting indie folk, a bit like a sigh in a dream, but still powerful, with her voice at its emotional centre. Five years into her recording career, she continues to focus on fleeting impressions of grief, memory, and longing – experiences rather than actual events – but she is now moving towards a more expansive, ethereal sound.
Ballentine’s first EP, Skullcrusher, which she wrote in her room while unemployed, featured songs built around little more than guitar and her voice. The follow-up, Storm in Summer, added more texture and some layers of reverb and synth, but it was not until her 2022 debut full-length, Quiet the Room, that she turned her grappling with uncertainty into a world which allowed for more than just confessional whispers. And if that record detailed the intimacies of childhood memory and domestic space, the new album attempts to trace what happens when everything starts to dissolve into vapour that then swirls and drifts across the landscape.
After a decade spent in Los Angeles, Ballentine moved home to the Hudson Valley, a return that became unexpectedly permanent. And Your Song is Like a Circle grew out of a sense of dissociation: living alone, caring for her sick cat, arranging cherished objects such as stuffed animals like talismans, and spending long days in near-silence or watching films of Hayao Miyazaki and David Lynch. All these details seep into the songs, which don’t feel written so much as stumbled upon, like they’ve been waiting for you to discover them. But almost as soon as you do, the memories they describe begin to fade like fibres that unspool.
“What do I live for? / Who do I live for? / I don’t know
anymore,” Ballentine whispers over soft piano on opener “March”, and
while most of the album isn’t quite this sparse or delicate, it sets the
tone for what follows. Focusing on the evaporative nature of
creativity, she explores how ideas appear and then disappear, leaving
only faint traces behind. Sometimes, though, songs that seem to be
disintegrating suddenly regain some of their weight, and these are Circle’s
best moments. Driven by the same few guitar chords played over and over
again, “Changes” starts out as pure ambient folk, gentle yet effective
as it hovers a few feet above ground, reminiscent of both Julianna
Barwick and Sigur Rós, before drone-like synthesizers attempt to get the
track to lift off through the sheer power of noise – and fail.
During recording, Ballentine experimented with new ways of
shaping her voice, including singing through contact microphones
attached to her throat, creating eerie sounds. Indeed, the boundary
between human and machine often blurs. On "Maelstrom", voices collide
with echoing drumbeats like water rushing through a cavern, while the
delicate vocal layers on “Exhale” spread into a haze of synthesizers and
strings. “Dragon” lets piano reverberate over tight, gritted
percussion, as she arranges her things “inside a glass case,” lamenting
repeatedly that “the weight is heavy.” The fragility and the uncertainty
remain on “Periphery”: “My songs are memories of you fading,” she sings
over loosely strummed acoustic guitar and sidelong synths. “Will I ever
see you this way again?” she wonders, the sound echoey and its overall
feel claustrophobic as if she is slowly sinking into a subterranean
lake.
If Ballentine’s voice, arrangements and the album’s
atmosphere have drawn you in, you’re sinking alongside her, with the
same quiet sense of restraint that characterises the record. Or, should
you feel that the drifting, ethereal quality sometimes results in the
songs becoming untethered and blurring into each other, you may just
watch as she slips beneath the surface. Circle is a compelling,
often mesmerizing listen, but you might have trouble finding a
foothold. It’s no use looking to Ballentine to offer one, though – she’s
not interested in anything that feels steady for long.
