Quiet the Room
Helen Ballentine’s spellbinding first full-length album Quiet the Room 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 Quiet the Room 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 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.
Blending misty ambience with introspective folk songwriting, the Los Angeles artist’s full-length debut is less about specifics than the way it all smears together.
Trading her rootsy folk beginnings for a more widescreen approach, Helen Ballentine casts an entrancing spell on her exploratory debut album
Ballentine conjures moments of striking beauty and emotional resonance that make Quiet the Room a worthy undertaking.
The debut full-length from Helen Ballentine pulls her sound closer to the kind of malevolence her band’s name would imply.
‘Quiet The Room’ leans heavily on folk, yet in style it embodies something entirely different.
After Helen Ballentine abandoned a degree in graphic design and a full-time job in a gallery to pursue music in earnest, she adopted the stage alias Skullcrusher for an eponymous debut EP that was ultimately released by indie powerhouse Secretly Canadian.
It’s the season of pining, wishing for your Gilmore Girls lifestyle, burning your tongue on hot coffee … Enter Skullcrusher, with her debut album, Quiet the Room.
From her self-titled EP in 2020, through 2021’s Storm in Summer EP, Helen Ballentine (aka Skullcrusher) has keenly shifted from familiar, lush indie folk to a less traditional sound, arriving now at her debut LP.
Skullcrusher’s ‘Quiet the Room’ offers copious moments of hushed self-reflection and aching sadness. Read our review.
Skullcrusher - Quiet the Room review: furious riffs and ear-piercing vocals