A Song For Friday: Darci Phenix

Sable is a diaphanous and rootsy wonder. Plus, releases by Hamilton Leithauser, Thin Lear, Consumables, Kutmah, Katie Dey, Ben Carey, Nickolas Mohanna, and Felipe Lara.

On my recent podcast, I was speaking about music as nourishment and the importance of debut albums to remind us that great sounds are being made all the time and can come seemingly from nowhere. The same goes for artists who may have been at work in regional ecosystems but take a while to get to your ears. One such wonder is Portland, OR, multimedia artist and musician Darci Phenix. She has been releasing music since 2017 but did not come to my attention until earlier this year when Katy Henriksen made the introduction. I was quickly captivated and couldn’t wait to spread the word.

Now, with the release of her fourth collection, Sable, Phenix is poised to spread her diaphanous and rootsy sound far beyond the Pacific Northwest. With its banjo and pedal steel, album opener Second Nature locates Phenix in an Appalachia of the mind, but that’s just the beginning of the wide-ranging delights to be found here.

The song I want to focus on is driven by the pulse of electronic drums and is lavished with as much synth as pedal steel, proving that Phenix’s cosmic Americana contains multitudes. Her soprano flows like a clear stream but is not afraid to pick up a few leaves and twigs along the way. As the track swells around her, Phenix pushes her voice ever skyward, and my heart wants to follow it. Take a listen.

Phenix says a theme of the album is her search for “sustainable love.” Reading between the lines of the lyrics to In Plain Sight, it appears the answers will be found both inside and out:

And although joy is hidden in plain sight
I never had to reach for sorrow, it was already inside
And I want to know what’s on your mind
What if I will never be enough to get what I want, to love who I love
Is it easier or harder to give up?

Life and love are complicated, winding roads. Listening to Darci Phenix’s disarming songs on Sable may help you find straighter lines between the points you need to leave and the ones you’re trying to reach. That is the quickest path after all. Start the journey here.

Also Out This Week

Hamilton Leithauser - This Side Of The Island In December, I celebrated the once and future Walkmen leader’s return to active solo duty when he released the title track to his fifth full-length album. Now it’s here, and it’s classic Leithauser, exploding with the passion of a barroom singalong and decorated with unexpected touches, whether horns, backing vocals, or vibraphones. Produced by Leithauser and his wife, Anna Stumpf, with help from The National’s Aaron Dessner, the album is wonderfully coherent despite being created over the last eight years. It all comes down to the songs, of course, and they are sturdy and beautiful, with a lean towards Waitsian Americana. Leithauser is in excellent voice throughout, too, with his tenor revealing new, quieter textures at times and ringing out in clarion fashion at all the right moments. One of our greatest singer-songwriters in or out of The Walkmen.

Thin Lear - A Shadow Waltzed Itself If you’re a fan of the Losing My Opinion podcast (and you should be since I was on it), you might find a disconnect between Thin Lear’s (aka Matt Longo) wry persona there and the wistful, high-voiced troubadour heard here. But get over it to be welcomed into a peaceful glade of chamber folk where life’s troubles are addressed in a manner both clear-eyed and poetic, as in The Diner, which seems to detail a May-December friendship between a teacher and the cook at a local eatery (“They’d call you angel/You didn’t like that/Cooking steak and eggs/In the pig fat”) who is stricken with dementia and takes her own life. “But I’m the singer/And this is my song/And it’s still my life/It’s just where you belong,” goes the key stanza, lovingly encompassing all art can do to create immortality.

Consumables - Infinity Games When I focused A Song For Friday on this Brooklyn band’s single Great Design in January, I predicted the album it signaled would be a “bright spot” in 2025. No words to eat, as the album is great fun throughout, with a good amount of variety between poles of aggression and chill while never losing sight of their USP. Consume this.

Kutmah - Sacred Conversations The L.A.-raised Berlin-based beatmaker pays tribute to the great Ras G, who died at 40 in 2019, with a kaleidoscopic and funky tapestry of brief tracks that engage body and soul. Ras G’s voice is heard throughout in sacred and profane quotes from interviews. The music is mostly Kutmah alone, however, except for one track featuring Alia on Theremin and the album closer, Amen Ra, which has Low Leaf on harp and synth bass for a blissful meeting of musical minds.

Katie Dey - Anomalies Including outtakes and off-cuts spanning 2015-2025, this collection from the Australian purveyor of “baroque pop constructions” sheathed “in a hard shell of glitch and gloss” delivers much of the same satisfaction of 2023’s triumphant Never Falter Hero Girl. Start here, start there, just start.

Ben Carey - EMP012 Gränstillstånd Modular-generated tones from another Austrian master of the synthetic. In 2023, his album Metastability focused on the Russian-designed “Paperface” synth to dazzling effect. On this EP, he combines three Buchlas and another Russian device to create an array of sounds that, although he describes them with abstraction, seem to generate a sort of robotic rainforest with all the beauty and terror promised by that idea.

Nickolas Mohanna - Speaker Rotations This New York-based artist and composer reports that this project came from “an expressionist frame of mind, exploring the dissonance and impermanence of the sounds.” That may make more sense than learning that this phantasmagoric assembly of sounds, which has me flashing back to Cluster at their finest, was made with trombone, piano, and guitar. It’s not until the penultimate track that the piano makes itself known, albeit still in heavily treated form. Gorgeous and absorbing stuff and another win from the AKP label.

Felipe Lara - Chamber Works For Strings This sprawling double album features some of the best of the best - including the Mivos and JACK quartets, Modney, and Hannah Levinson - assaying Lara’s work mostly for strings (clarinetist Joshua Rubin appears on one track) and putting it on glorious display, from the knotty to the sublime.