Skullcrusher has announced her highly new album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, will drop on October 17th via Dirty Hit Records. Ahead of the album’s arrival, the singer/songwriter has shared Lead single “Exhale.” The video for the track was conceptualised by Ballentine in collaboration with director Adam Alonzo and shot in Upstate New York in and around her mother’s house.

While making the album, Ballentine focused deeply on the evaporative nature of creative work: the way ideas can appear and dissipate, leaving only faint traces behind, the way a voice courses through a fragile point in time, the way meaning can flicker and falter between people trying their best to understand each other. She recorded at home and in friends’ studios, working alongside Aaron Paul O’Brien in Los Angeles and co-producer Isaac Eiger (Lauren Balthrop, Cassandra Jenkins) in New York.

Helen Ballentne on “Exhale:”

“Exhale is about noticing the moment when a song is first conceived,” There is a part of me that wants to stop there and leave the song unfinished, before structure settles in and the song evolves. Instead, I allow it to form & accept whatever it may become. This process feels natural, like taking a pause at the top of your inhale before letting it all out. Maybe through acknowledging this process I can feel more at peace with change in general. When thoughts, words & sounds interact in a certain way they can reveal a path forward. Sometimes I want to linger before this path, in a space that feels hidden and safe, but in the end I take the path & surrender to change.”

And Your Song is Like a Circle was recorded following the release of her 2022 debut, Quiet the Room. Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she’d called home for nearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New York’s Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks.

Skullcrusher
And Your Song is Like a Circle
Tracklist
Dirty Hit Records

01 March
02 Dragon
03 Living
04 Maelstrom
05 Changes
06 Periphery
07 Red Car
08 Exhale
09 Vessel
10 The Emptying

Pre-order And Your Song is Like a Circle by Skullcruher HERE