This week’s record came out on the 11th of September, and the story of how it got made is almost as good as the songs. This Is Lorelei is Nate Amos — a 35-year-old songwriter from St Johnsbury, Vermont, now based in Brooklyn, and the other half of the experimental duo Water From Your Eyes. For most of the last twelve years the Lorelei name was a private hobby: dozens upon dozens of self-recorded albums, EPs and mixtapes dumped onto Bandcamp within days of being finished, swerving between lo-fi bedroom pop, hyperpop, drone and hushed country, often on the same tracklist. Then 2024’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star quietly went off — a sleeper hit that picked up two reissues and a queue of famous admirers lining up to cover it, including MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee, Jeff Tweedy, Hayley Williams and Cameron Winter. This new one is his first for Matador, and he’d already finished it before he signed. He kept it secret from the label right through negotiations, then delivered the completed album within half an hour of signing the contract.
The Singer in My Band is eleven songs in about thirty-four minutes, written, played, produced and engineered almost entirely by Amos in his home studio, and it’s billed as his first proper road record. The ideas arrived, as he tells it, while daydreaming in the car with no instruments to hand — which turns out to change everything. Where Box for Buddywas diaristic and stuffed with run-on verses he then had to memorise on stage, this one is lean and deliberate, and it leans harder than ever into country, folk and bluegrass. That’s no accident: his father Bob Amos is a professional bluegrass banjo player, and he turns up on the title track alongside Amos’s sister Sarah on vocals, the closest thing here to a full string band. Amos calls the songs “short stories,” and they’re populated by a recurring cast — Joey, Bobby, Billy, Genevieve, Sarah, the ever-present Buddy — drifting through an Americana road film. Lead single “Billy Came Back” is the one to start with, an uptempo, melancholy thing about a karaoke singer whose return makes everyone else’s night better; Amos says it nagged at him for months before he finally sat down with a guitar, and that “finishing the song was the only way to get it to leave me alone.” Elsewhere “Oh No Now My” goes brooding and grungy, “Watching Heaven Fall” treats the end of the world as a bit of a laugh, and “Hey Sarah Is It Gonna Rain Forever” is the tender one, strings and fingerpicking and that soft, close-miked voice.
What stops it tipping into the earnest solemnity that modern roots music can fall into is Amos’s refusal to be reverent about any of it. He’s been open in interviews about getting sober and about writing through addiction — Box for Buddydealt with it head-on — but his defence against taking himself too seriously is disarming: making music, he reckons, is “a fundamentally funny and slightly embarrassing thing to be spending time doing,” and admitting that opens doors. The critics have come to the party. Pitchfork gave it an eight and called it the sound of a songwriter sketching out his own gospel; Stereogum made it their album of the week; NME reckoned that while it’s less unpredictable than its predecessor, it’s his most fully realised and assured record yet. If you like Alex G, MJ Lenderman or Cameron Winter, this belongs in the same conversation — and if you’ve never heard a note of him, this is the easiest door into a catalogue most people find genuinely daunting.
New Zealand Net Radio plays a song from our irregularly updated #albumoftheweek every hour from 9am to 12pm. Listen on our website - https://www.nznetradio.net.nz/listen
