4 To Watch For: Eszter Balint

A simple, descending blues figure played on a banjo, an alluring, slightly weary voice, then a manic, stringed kr-thunk. It’s the first minute of Eszter Balint’s new album Mud (Bar/None), and the singer/songwriter has already staked out a barbed musical territory of her own, somewhere between Nashville and No Wave.

Balint’s backstory is laden with journalistic factoids—born to members of a dissident theatre troupe in Cold War Hungary; emigration to New York during the early ’80s; acting roles in movies by Jim Jarmusch and Woody Allen—but music has been her primary interest since the early ’90s. Mud is the product of four years’ work on the road and in Balint’s home studio, and follows the critical and cult success of 1999’s Flicker. “[At the time,] I was really into Beck, P.J. Harvey, Björk—there was all this cool stuff actually getting played on the radio,” says Balint. “With this record I can pretty honestly say nothing current [inspired me].”

Indeed, Mud—produced by J.D. Foster (who also plays on it)—betrays a sort of inwardness, a patient shaping of thoroughly digested influences. “I had to get on a kind of internal journey—which sounds really pretentious—but I had to work a lot harder to find in me what it is that I like,” Balint says. Which may explain the four-year lag time. “I’ve been sort of working on songs here and there for years, so that’s not a very concise process. … I worked a lot at home doing little home demos, little digital recording units. I set up a bunch of shows to do these songs live,” unlike her first album, she says, because “with these I wanted to feel like they were finished.”

The result is a craggy, erratic blues-rock album with literary touches (Balint is an avid reader of poetry, with Charles Simic being a current favorite). “I’ve been influenced by that kind of poetry that is very—there’s a great simplicity to it, it’s stripped down, and yet there are so many layers going on,” she says. This influence is evident in songs like “This Lie” and “No One,” and perhaps most of all in “Who Are You Now,” the final song on the album and a devastating ballad: “If you left any proof you passed this way / I mostly remember waking up one day / With no more reason to keep your shadow around / Watch it change shape as I hold what I found.” And with that the album ends, a little too soon, like a short visit with an enigmatic, welcoming friend.