'Alan Sparhawk with Trampled by Turtles' Album Review

Alan Sparhawk Reclaims His Voice on With Trampled by Turtles

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Grief is a part of life. There is no way to get around that. It is also awful: a raw, pulsing wound too painful to look at directly, let alone touch, let alone bandage.

When Low’s Alan Sparhawk lost his partner of 30 years in both life and music, Mimi Parker, to ovarian cancer in 2022, the void she left in her wake became a chasm he found nearly impossible to climb out of—not in the least because his primary outlet, the music he created with Parker in Low, felt impossible to even think of in her absence. In June 2023, he confirmed that Low, the band in which he and Parker had spent three decades entwining their voices in singular, crushing harmony (quite literally; it was their calling card), could not and would not continue without her, writing on X that “Low is and was Mimi.” In those months following Parker’s passing, Sparhawk found that his own voice, his own language—his instrument, yes, but so much more too—was no longer available or even recognizable without hers beside it. As he put it in an audio interview with KGNU Community Radio last month, “I had a hard time with my voice. Even playing guitar felt weird. […] I was struggling with who I was by myself; what my voice was, even, without that other harmony.”

This is, perhaps, the reason his first album since her death—last year’s White Roses, My God—was similarly unrecognizable: it had to be. “The tools I used before no longer work,” he explained to The Guardian in a beautiful, heartbreaking interview last July. “I’m trying to use my voice, but I don’t want to hear my voice, so I needed to find another voice.” And that’s exactly what he did—everything on the album was pushed through a meat grinder of digital filters, ensuring the vulnerable core at the heart of the record, the one that could have been heard through his voice, was Auto-Tuned into oblivion and scrambled into unintelligibility. It was necessary, seemingly for the same reason we need those special glasses to watch eclipses: true contact would be too harmful to the human eye. You can hear that desperation in the record itself, even as the exact words and meaning were rendered elusive, transformed into chaotic technobabble.

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It’s only been about eight months since the release of White Roses. And yet, somehow, in With Trampled by Turtles, Sparhawk’s latest record—a collaborative effort with long-time friends from Low’s hometown of Duluth, Minnesota, the bluegrass sextet of Trampled by Turtles—it’s like he manages to take off the glasses and stare straight into the raw light of the sun. Perhaps the communal support of the band around him served as something of a protective salve, too, because while the pain that should immediately and inevitably result from this direct contact is certainly present in the record, it’s couched in something softer, warmer: it feels like love, even more than it feels like the loss of it. Here, Sparhawk levels an unflinching gaze at his own grief—and instead of going blind, he finds a way to see.

In this light, what makes With Trampled by Turtles remarkable isn’t just that Sparhawk’s voice is back, unfiltered and unprocessed, but that it sounds like his voice. Scarred, unsteady, occasionally fraying at the edges, but undeniably his. The difficulty of this, of trying to hold the swirling miasma of grief on one’s tongue, is taken out of subtext and put into text on “Too High,” a song he and Mimi Parker began together before her death. The context transforms its lines into small explosions. “You put the words to a melody and try to make it fit / Sometimes it kills you, but it sets you free / Cuts right through it,” he sings, buoyed by gorgeous harmonies from Trampled by Turtles. There’s a catharsis here, but it comes from the slow climb out of something that doesn’t really have an end. From the concerted effort it takes to turn the feeling into song, even as it hurts.

“Stranger,” which serves as both the lead single and the album opener, is all mundane imperatives, the kind that remain intact even as loss wipes clean nearly everything else: you might be grieving, but you still need to clean your dashboard cupholder. You got to deal with strange people and go through “dangerouser” (the postmodern poet in me will never not love Sparhawk’s dedication to un-languaging language, phrasing pitched to emotional tenor over grammatical norms—and luckily for me, With Trampled by Turtles has no small share of that) things than you ever thought you’d need to confront. There’s a mischief to it, but also a tedious survivalism; Sparhawk doesn’t need to explain the strangeness, just that it’s coming, and you’re going to have to endure it. For a man long associated with slowness, heaviness, and spiritual severity, “Stranger” (and much of the record, given its bluegrass tenor) is unusually bouncy: the song opens with a flick of staccato strings and spills quickly into a warm, kinetic gallop. But the lyrical detail stuns and slows all the same. This isn’t grief as an abstract concept. This is grief as “you might be dealing with a loss that rattles your entire belief system, but your dashboard cupholder is still really gross and you need to do something about that, man.” You’ve gotta “tend to the detail / You’ve gotta write that shit down.” The void doesn’t pause for you to catch your breath—it demands errands, lists, small talk with weird people.

And there’s the miracle: rather than pulling away from these banalities, Sparhawk leans into them. The metaphysical becomes physical, tactile. On White Roses, My God, he blurred himself into a static-ridden abstraction, almost daring the listener to decode what could barely be made legible. But With Trampled by Turtles is almost plaintive in its legibility at times; not in the sense that his grief is solved or smoothed over, but in the sense that it’s simply allowed to exist—loss not as a puzzle but as the presence of an absence.

That “presence-of-absence” undertone is pervasive throughout the album. The record leaves room for the void Parker left in her wake, and I’d argue that it feels honored even more than it feels mourned. There’s a conspicuous lack of drums on the album—one that seems purposeful, considering Parker was Low’s drummer. But because the record is, of course, a bluegrass-oriented one—a genre partially defined by its eschewing of drumlines—there’s never a moment where the absence becomes a deficit. Rather, it’s the absence that creates the whole. Because it is a whole; the record is impressively cohesive and unified, not only song-to-song but also in feeling, in tone. It’s a group of seven people creating on the same wavelength, a coherence and ease to it that could only come from years upon years of friendship, love—the kind, naturally, that was at the core of Low, too. Sparhawk is not replacing Parker—that would be an impossible task to even conceive of for anyone facing such a loss—but he’s creating something new while keeping the spirit of her alive, fluttering around the edges and burning at the core.

In fact, a third of the record is made up of tracks Sparhawk originally conceived with Parker—but they’re able to exist now, even without her tangibly there, perhaps because she’s so clearly still living inside them. This is obvious in “Not Broken,” on which Sparhawk and Parker’s daughter, Hollis, sing the chorus Parker herself presumably would have given voice to. It is, by some distance, the album’s most emotional gesture, unbearably devastating and ineffably sweet in equal measure: a familial echo, one voice stepping in where another can no longer go. Hollis doesn’t imitate Parker, but the resemblance is jarring, a literal genetic offspring that pulls the song into the uncanny valley of grief. Each and every time Hollis’ voice—which is, of course, heartrendingly beautiful—enters the mix, the weight of it lands anew. (Reader, I admit I teared up. And I don’t even cry at music, typically! But there I was—on a plane, next to strangers, crying! If the song wasn’t so good I’d be mad at it.) The chorus of “It’s not broken, I’m not angry” repeats like a mantra, or a lie you tell yourself until it starts to feel true. But, maybe, it already does—or at least, is starting to.

And then comes album centerpiece “Screaming Song,” which doesn’t bother with mantras at all. It’s as direct and naked as Sparhawk has ever allowed himself to be on tape. “When you flew out the window and into the sunset,” he begins, “I thought I would never stop screaming / I thought I would never stop screaming your name.” The song is quiet in its heartbreak and relentless in its grace, joining my personal pantheon of “songs about loss I can barely listen to because they destroy me emotionally just that much,” alongside songs from Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me, or Nick Cave’s Ghosteen—the kind of records that Sparhawk himself believed, less than a year ago, he could never successfully write. Talking about Ghosteen specifically in that aforementioned The Guardian interview, he calls it “a grieving record, yet still resonant, beautiful and so, so eloquent. I can’t decipher the world that way; I’m not that kind of writer.” And yet, here he is: grieving, resonant, beautiful, and so, so eloquent.

Whether or not he views the song as such, as a listener, I can say with some degree of certainty that the near-singular emotions evoked in me by A Crow Looked at Me and Ghosteen found that same purchase here, especially with the wailing strings at the end from Trampled by Turtles, screeching jaggedly as if to imitate the human voice. It is honestly one of the most powerful depictions of grief in music I’ve heard in quite some time. There’s no metaphor here, no distortion, no cover. It is simply an account of life after loss, of how a person might try to survive the impossible by making noise until they run out of air. And when they do—when Sparhawk does—he breathes in again and starts to scream even louder. It’s a brutal thing, not in its sound but in its honesty. The song pulses with a kind of performative restraint—he’s trying, really trying, “to be cool here,” as he admits—but the heartbreak can’t help but bleed through: “But inside I’m screaming this song,” he sings, and when you hear the shriek of strings at the song’s end, God, do you believe him.

That track might be the furthest this album comes from White Roses, My God, simply because it is so immensely vulnerable and raw, but this different approach remains intact throughout With Trampled by Turtles, even when the source material is taken from none other than White Roses itself. Remarkably enough, two of the album’s most surprising tracks—“Heaven” and “Get Still”—are surprising precisely because they aren’t new at all, just unrecognizable. Both originally appeared on White Roses in that highly processed, often unintelligible form consistent with the rest of that record. Their inclusion here, in newly reimagined versions, could’ve felt like retreads, or re-dos. Instead, they feel revelatory. The transformation is total: from abstraction to embodiment, from coded distress to unarmored presence. Both iterations are meaningful in their own ways, but placed together, it becomes something new entirely, the process turned into the point.

“Heaven,” barely two minutes long, is one such return. On White Roses, My God, it felt like a whisper from behind glass: vocoded, ghostly, almost afraid to speak its name outside the comforting cover of hyperpoppy vocals. But here, stripped down to Sparhawk’s voice and the softest halo of acoustic instrumentation, it becomes something else entirely. Not louder, but perhaps, braver. “Heaven / It’s a lonely place if you’re alone,” he sings, his voice aching not with despair but with a kind of wide-eyed clarity. It’s a plea, sure, but it’s also a promise: to be there, to make space, to keep love tethered to the earth by sheer force of will. The song resists elaboration—there are barely forty words total—but its brevity is its power. It doesn’t meander or mask. It simply says what it means and trusts you’ll feel the rest. And you do.

That trust—this newly recalibrated relationship between Sparhawk and his listener, or really, probably Sparhawk and himself—is one of the album’s subtler achievements. Take “Get Still,” another track pulled from the previous record, where it existed as a kind of digital séance: a surrealist blur of processed vocals and glitched-out textures that rendered the emotion at its core almost illegible. The new version doesn’t “fix” that song so much as reframe it. With Trampled by Turtles behind him, Sparhawk doesn’t need to bury the feeling anymore—it’s allowed to breathe, and as a result, it expands. The uncanny disjunction of the original lyrics doesn’t vanish in this translation from electronic to acoustic, but is instead carried by the communal warmth of the surrounding instrumentation. The bluegrass arrangement doesn’t just ground the song so much as give it roots—organic, tangled, imperfect—and Sparhawk’s unfiltered voice, unguarded and steady, becomes the anchor.

These reimaginings are not about providing clarity, though. If anything, both White Roses, My God and With Trampled by Turtles make a case for emotion being the clarity that language inevitably fails. There’s still that elliptical and dreamlike sensation in how Sparhawk lets strange phrases tumble out (“Kitty needs this for chips,” “Remember the Stouffer”) but now we feel what he’s saying even more than before, despite still lacking any literal comprehension. “Princess Road Surgery” does something similar, as evident in the name alone; “At her feet / Millions of inspirie / Gotta be / Princess Road Surgery.”

Who is Princess Road Surgery? Not sure, but I’m a little obsessed with her. What’s the definition of “inspirie”? One that won’t be found within the pages of the OED, at least. But when Sparhawk reaches the chorus and sings “So much for saving the world / I thought she’d make it for sure / Too much for one little girl,” the pain, the grief, rings loud and true just the same. It’s all very Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons—and I am, frankly, a known sucker for that kind of approach—in that Sparhawk seems to see language and grammar as suggestion, not guideline, and follows meaning rather than rules. There might not always be logic, so to speak, but in its place comes visceral emotion. There’s a lesson in that (one I learned in a Sophomore year English class on “Utter Nonsense in Postmodern Poetry”): coherence is sometimes overrated, and connection doesn’t always demand full comprehension. It’s about presence. Resonance. The willingness to sit with someone—even if you don’t fully understand them—and say, I’m here.

That’s what this album does, over and over again. It doesn’t pretend to offer resolution. But it offers something better: accompaniment. Not just conceptually, but literally, through the soft gravity of collaboration. Sparhawk may be the primary voice and writer, but With Trampled by Turtles is just about the least “solo” a solo record has ever been. Hell, it’s even in the name: With Trampled by Turtles is not the product of an individual, but a shared act, a collective holding. You can hear it in the way the string lines lean into each other, the way harmonies pile up gently behind Sparhawk’s voice without crowding it out. There’s a sense—rare, and difficult to fake—that everyone involved is not just playing with him, but for him. Not as a backing band, not as a feature, but as co-authors of something sacred and fragile and alive.

It’s fitting, then, that some of the most powerful moments on the album are also its most communal: the ethereal chorus of “Get Still,” the multi-voiced build of “Too High,” the collective hush that holds “Heaven” in place, the unison of Sparhawk’s voice and his daughter’s at the end of “Not Broken.” Even on a song like “Don’t Take Your Light,” where Sparhawk’s lyrics threaten to collapse under their own weight—“I can be patient / I can feel nothing / I feel everything”—the music beneath him holds steady, like a hand gripping yours in the dark. It’s not that Trampled by Turtles makes the grief go away. It’s that they make it survivable. And not just survivable—sharable. Their presence reminds you that sorrow doesn’t always demand isolation. That sometimes, the only way forward is together.

It would be easy to overstate the contrast between this and White Roses, My God; to cast one as the cave and the other as the sun. But Alan Sparhawk’s work doesn’t really operate in binaries. It never has. Low has always been Low, whether they’re championing “slowcore” (a genre name they themselves did not claim, for whatever it’s worth) or branching into electronic experimentation. Similarly, White Roses, for all its distortion and distance, was also trying to reach for something. It just didn’t know how to touch it yet. With Trampled by Turtles doesn’t pretend to have figured it out either. It doesn’t promise resolution or repair. But it does let you sit beside the pain without being dissolved by it. It gives grief shape, texture, room to breathe—and it gives Sparhawk room to breathe, too.

That may be what’s most striking of all: the sound of someone remembering how to breathe. There’s still an ache in that voice, yes, but there’s a pulse in it now too. A rhythm. A reminder: maybe healing isn’t some grand, cinematic moment. Maybe it’s realizing you’re still screaming, but you’re not screaming alone—and you’re also wiping out the dashboard cupholder for the first time in ages, and that’s got to count for something.

That’s the thing about grief: you can’t cure it, and you can’t solve it. But you can accompany it. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can write a song with your friends that doesn’t fix the pain, but makes it hum in tune. That’s what Sparhawk has done here. Not moved on, not looked away, but stayed—stayed in the ache, stayed in the room, stayed in the music. And in doing so, he’s made something that doesn’t just mourn what was lost, but cherishes what remains. There is, perhaps, a kind of light that only shows up after the worst has already happened. Not redemptive, not warm, and not, of course, some improvement to one’s life compared to before the loss; just a visible newness brought about by the forced realignment of perspective that comes hand-in-hand with grief. With Trampled by Turtles seems to live in that light. That’s not to say it’s blind to the damage; quite the opposite. It’s just not afraid to look right at it and, despite everything, to even weave it into song.

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

Alan Sparhawk Reclaims His Voice on With Trampled by Turtles

With Trampled by Turtles along for the ride, there’s a sense—rare, and difficult to fake—that everyone involved is not just playing with Sparhawk, but for him. Not as a backing band, not as a feature, but as co-authors of something sacred and fragile and alive.