Somewhere deep in the background of Widowspeak’s seventh album, Roses, you might hear a church bell, a donkey braying, a cat fight, the sound of wind whipping over the Aegean Sea. The band made the record at the Old Carpet Factory on the Greek island Hydra: a studio in an old house tucked into the village’s steep hills.There’s a relaxed, gentle quality to these new songs. The band (Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas as the core and its songwriters, with Willy Muse, John Andrews, and Noah Bond as the players) feels at ease, taking their time. The recordings feel off-the-cuff and imperfect, and yet perfectly what they ought to be. Maybe it took traveling thousands of miles to get to the heart of what they do well, to make their strongest and freshest album to date.Across the ten songs of Roses, the band continue to strike a balance between homage to indie rock traditions and their own defined style, honed over the past 16 years. Molly is a wry, observational narrator. The melodies are playful and meandering, and her voice sometimes lilting and velvety, sometimes scratchy and breaking.Widowspeak as a band really shines in a live setting, and Roses captures that light perfectly. “No Driver” burns especially brightly: slow, simmering verses that crack open with blistering, overdriven guitars. “If You Change” brims with jangly sweetness a la The La’s, and “Heaven is Waiting” simmers as a good slow core ballad ought to. The angular tension and blissful release of “Soft Cover” almost feels like the Sundays doing a B52s cover. The title track bounces along with an almost Neilson-esque lilt. Hamilton speaks to the drive to keep doing something for the possibility of eventual beauty, despite everything in the world telling you it might not work out. To be a band in 2026 is, truly, a labor of love.You might say the band is perennially underrated, one of the most consistent and hardworking bands still somehow bubbling under the surface. Roses is unpruned and more beautiful for it; left a little wild as it stretches its new growth in all directions. Maybe it’s the sort of growth that can only come from toiling in relative obscurity.These ten songs offer the best of what Widowspeak does. Widowspeak is still a band, a really great band, making really great records. And maybe that fact is in itself remarkable.
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