No matter who is actually present in the same physical space while Oakland-based experimental artist and field recordist Kathryn Mohr records or performs, she is always alone. Even when her music’s turns toward intense claustrophobia—writhing over a stifled ability to connect with another body in the room—her work aims to convince any ears against the wall that they are catching the last set of layered voices bearing down over the last fuzz-ridden guitar remaining on the face of the earth. There’s no stillness in her isolation either, as 2025’s Waiting Room, her critical breakthrough and debut release with The Flenser, proved. Even in its more muted acoustic meditations, there is the suggestion of boots scuffing against each other to outrun the headlights flashing down a desolate highway. You might think you’ve heard all the sounds a singular guitar can make until you hear her pinning you to the roughest edge of the asphalt and holding you there. “Relentless” might be the word. There’s a moment of that album’s track “Elevator” where Mohr laughs over the spare onslaught of a riff ringing on, like she welcomes the crash, which might exemplify this best.
Carve, Waiting Room’s follow-up, does little to dissuade that initial impression she left for us. Five years in the making, the record first took shape with a visit to the American Southwest—Mohr’s first time back in the region since an early childhood road trip. If there’s been any shift in sonic approach, it’s a tangible aridity the desert brings. Recorded in a western-themed Airbnb and mixed by Agriculture’s Richard Chowenhill, Carve’s setting still leans nocturnal, but the road Mohr and her soundscapes swerve on feel bound to a monotonous summer heat. In keeping with previous releases, her lyrics remain opaque—near-surrealist stabs of violent imagery to best describe her isolation.
“I’m running around with my head cut off,” she sings on “Commit,” letting the words sit in the back of her throat like she’s positioned to snatch her hand away the second you reach out for it. It places us back in this distinct headspace Mohr has operated in for the last half-decade, establishing the table stakes for this go-around: grief as a condition of intimacy, where the point isn’t so much a specific instance of loss, but the knowledge that such loss is both constant and imminent, like a collar she’s pulled around by as she tries to love and be loved despite it. Again, it’s relentless: in its fear of feeling too alive, that a life which seems too perfect will force her to run. Not much has changed.
“I’m picking to the bone / It’s all I’ve ever known / And what’s with you, your attitude / I wrestle to belong,” Mohr roars on “Angle of Repose,” matching a multi-tracked howl with the hollow, untethered growl of guitar. She falls into a repeated drawl of “Who cares?” on the song’s chorus, though she doesn’t quite convince us of her ambivalence with each repeated call. “She’s stabbed two times in the neck / Dumped on a pile of red ants,” she intones over “Cells,” one of the tracklist’s most melodic turns, painting vicious scenes on the wall she’s built to keep us at a distance.
Though these hallmarks from prior projects that made them so distinctive are present—and perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the material gestated prior to Waiting Room’s release—those searching for more might find it also doesn’t quite push beyond what Mohr’s already shown us she’s capable of. To be fair, it’s not for a total lack of trying: the record opens and closes with wordless, more ambient tracks incorporating Mohr’s field recordings—”Bone Infection” and “Crow Eyes,” respectively, as well as the scraping, clanging interlude of “Chromium 6” in the record’s last stretch—each of which do a sufficient job of offsetting the more bare-bones material that follows or precedes it, respectively. There are also tentative but thrilling steps outside of that desolate atmosphere the record mostly sticks by on a song like “Owner,” where Mohr’s guitar eschews its typical sludge, holding form while layers of other noises, include one that mimics the sounds of snorting animals, sprout out of the foundation she sets.
Yet, anyone expecting a huge stylistic evolution may walk away from Carve with a half-hearted shrug. Though her lyrics still rope you in even as they repel, and the palette she’s made her signature remains singular to her, those more sonically straightforward tracks can begin to bleed together for a casual listener, delivering neither hooky immediacy nor, on the other side of the spectrum, gripping suspense in their arrangement or production. The stripped back nature of the recording is the point, but it makes you wonder what other forms these songs could have taken—or whether tracks that share such a similar approach were all needed to make the final cut. Upon repeated listens, such melodies and intricacies within the arrangements do begin to reveal themselves, though there are moments when Carve feels like an exercise in digging for gems in a pile of sound.
Again, don’t be mistaken: the gems are there, and Kathryn Mohr has lost none of her bite in the actual composition of her songs. More than anything, it makes you interested in what approach she’ll take the next time around, how and if she’ll continue to adorn the bones she’s buried and excavated from the side of her highway. As she works through this cyclical sting of connection and loss, it’s certainly still worth running wild alongside her, pressing our ear against the wall built to keep us away—feeling, if not quite seeing, waiting for the sound of the crash. [The Flenser]
Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.
