Name: Quiet the Room
Brand: Skullcrusher

Bonus disc

Bonus disc: No

Catalogue number

SC410CD

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Colour

Colour details

Discogs ID

Discs

Download code

Download code: No

Rough Trade Exclusive

Rough Trade Exclusive: No

Extended format

Extended format: No

Format detail

Format Music GB

Limited edition

Release date

2022-10-14

Signed copies

Signed copies: No

Supplier GB

PIAS

Tax rate GB

UPC / Barcode

656605041025

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1 / CD / Extended format: No / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No

SC410LP

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black

656605041018

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "656605041018"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

1 / Extended format: No / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / black

SC410LP-C1

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "SC410LP-C1"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

white

Cloudy White

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "Cloudy White"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

Extended format: Yes

656605041032

{"blocks": [{"data": {"text": "656605041032"}, "type": "paragraph"}]}

1 / Extended format: Yes / LP / Rough Trade Exclusive: No / Signed copies: No / white

Artist

Skullcrusher

Genre GB

Singer Songwriter

Label GB

Secretly Canadian

Helen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album<i> Quiet the Room</i> is the sound of a window opening, a barrier dissolving. Across these fourteen tracks, the outside world seeps in and the inside world crawls out. The result is a stunning and quietly moving work that reflects the journeys we take through the physical and spiritual realms of ourselves in order to show up for the world.

While writing the album in the summer of 2021, Ballentine drew inspiration from her childhood home in Mount Vernon, NY. What she set out to capture on <i>Quiet the Room</i> was not the innocence of childhood, as it is so often portrayed, but the intense complexity of it. Past and present merge Escher-like in this dreamlike space laced with elements of fantasy, magic, and mystery. Musically, this translates into a sound that feels somehow weighty and ephemeral all at once, like a time lapse of copper corroding.

To capture the effortless blend of electronic, ambient, folk, and rock, Ballentine and her partner and collaborator Noah Weinman brought in producer Andrew Sarlo to record at Chicken Shack studio in Upstate New York, close to where Ballentine grew up. “We wanted every song to have that little twinkle, but also a sense of crumbling,” she says. These songs thrum with moments of anxiety that boil over into moments of peace, as on lead single “Whatever Fits Together,” which chugs to a ragged start before the gears catch and ease. On “It’s Like a Secret,” Ballentine struggles to connect and let people in, recognizing that no one can ever fully know our inner worlds and that to understand each other is to cross a barrier and leave a part of ourselves behind. And yet, on closing track “You are my House,” she finds a way to reach out. “You are the walls and floors of my room,” she sings in perfect, hopeful harmony.

As the album cover invites, these are dollhouse songs to which we bend a giant eye, peering into the laminate, luminous world that Ballentine has created. Like a kid constructing a shelter in a patch of sharp brambles, she reminds us that beauty and terror can exist in the same place. The complexities of childhood are so often overlooked, but through these private yet generous songs, she gives new weight to our earliest memories, widening the frame for us—even opening a window.