No Album Left Behind: Laurel Halo Quietly Charts the Trajectory of Memory on Atlas

For the rest of this year, we’re delighted to continue with our No Album Left Behind series, in which our core team of music critics reviews some of their favorite records we may have missed the first time around, looking back at some of the best overlooked releases of 2023.

A silly understatement would be to describe the year 2020 as tumultuous—global emergencies, political upheavals and elections that caught the world’s gaze spurred questions about what kind of world we’d inhabit in the new decade. As much as that year felt like a turning point, though, we remain plagued by many of the same conflicts, even if their symptoms look different. Those conflicts are existential, and there was no way they’d get expelled within the year. A world at odds with its past and future feels more familiar than any sense of stability at this point.

Also, in 2020, a main character of contemporary experimental and electronic music, Laurel Halo, began toying around on the piano during a pivotal arts residency. That reinvigorated love for the piano informs her latest album, Atlas—an arresting collection of misty synths, strings, vocals, keys and saxophone that is as close to a sensory representation of thought as one can approximate. Throughout, the palettes seem almost at odds with each other, tussling amongst themselves for control over the narrative. However, it sounds less like the pointed arguments of 2020 and more like a familiar, eternal negotiation. The components of Atlas struggle past each other as in capoeira, engaging in a beautifully combative yet symbiotic relationship.

That beautiful restraint is part of what makes Atlas so transfixing: Laurel Halo has historically been one to show not tell but, even here, what she shows is murky. Atlas is a bricolage of 10 jazzy soundscapes, all of which sound distinct but forge connections through their shared ephemerality. “Abandon” sets the scene brilliantly, with Halo’s dizzying electronics humming beneath the piano, cello (Lucy Railton), violin (James Underwood) and saxophone (Bendik Giske). The pieces have sensory antecedents that are especially on point. “Late Night Drive” feels exactly like how it’s titled—its periodic crescendo and diminuendo cycle reminiscent of pumping and easing the brakes, the hum of electric propulsion gaining more steam during periods where the strings soar the highest. “Sick Eros” is where those strings truly reach their apex, rising and falling like a proper symphony, drawn out to spectral extremes that ache. It feels familiar but so very distant.

With its soft hiss and warm resonance, “Belleville” is an especially alluring track, offering a unique glimpse into the consciousness Halo is deconstructing. She augments the broken-down piano ballad by singing the scales her hands generate, supporting that climax with strings and harmonies provided by Coby Sey. It feels like a familiar song, improvised into but a clip—as if the listener is walking past a jazz club on a snowy evening and peeking their head in for a sample. As soon as “Belleville” appears, Halo has moved on. “Sweat, Tears, or the Sea” muddies the piano and electronics even deeper, masking the quick fluctuations she creates under an impenetrable haze.

The title track offers the greatest glimpse at the tactile processes of Laurel Halo’s music. The different bowing techniques, the pressing of piano pedals, all can be felt just as the music can be heard. Like many songs on Atlas, much time is spent in gentle dissonance, hovering in spaces that feel “off” but not off enough to feel wrong, just in limbo. In this space, resolution is within sight, but just out of reach. On “Reading the Air,” the cello and violin swing past each other like pendulums that never meet, harmonious at times, distinct in their paths, acted upon by similar forces. “Earthbound” is, ironically, a heavenly closer, bringing the saxophone back for another exercise in sonic levitation.

Despite the restraint exercised throughout Atlas, there is charm and richness that is omnipresent. Nothing is rushed, but every thought experiment has a distinct time and place, tracing the subconscious push and pull of thought on tracing paper. While everything on the album suggests some kind of swirling motion, there’s also a sense of quietude, of something remaining ensconced in place while these voices negotiate for momentary control of the narrative. In that stillness, the music washes over the listener, replicating the sensory experiences Halo recalls on these tracks. It feels not like nostalgia but like remapping, creating a spatial and sonic archive through recalling and interpreting memory. The music may be quiet, but its implications are far from small. Atlas is ambient neoclassical at its finest; stirring and introspective without succumbing to sameness, furthering Laurel Halo’s extensive, unpredictable influence on experimental and electronic traditions.

Devon Chodzin is a critic and urban planner with bylines at Aquarium Drunkard, Bandcamp Daily, Slumber Mag and more. He is currently a student in Philadelphia. He lives on Twitter @bigugly.