Never said it’d be like this, right? Skullcrusher’s 21st century rendering of The Hated’s 1985 early emo blueprint “Words Come Back” reinvents the song as subtle, ambient folk music. The flip features two versions of the original, including Dan Littleton’s home demo, cut in a maddening double groove, and housed in an elegant black and silver sleeve, with embossed braille lettering for the visually impaired. “This is my way of making a punk song,” Skullcrusher’s Helen Ballentine said, “ignoring structure and letting everything just pour out—though quite a bit quieter.”

TRACK LISTING

A1 Skullcrusher - Words Come Back
B1 The Hated - Words Come Back
B2 The Hated - Words Come Back (Piano Version)

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 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.

STAFF COMMENTS

Liam says: Don't let the name fool you... Debut LP from Skullcrusher (real name Helen Ballentine), 'Quiet the Room' is a stunning mix of folk, ambient and field recordings - all wrapped up in an ethereal dreamlike bow. Reminds me of Lucy Rose mixed with Lina Tullgren - lovely stuff!

TRACK LISTING

1. They Quiet The Room
2. Building A Swing
3. Whatever Fits Together
4. Whistle Of The Dead
5. Lullaby In February
6. Pass Through Me
7. Could It Be The Way I Look At Everything?
8. Outside, Playing
9. It’s Like A Secret
10. Sticker
11. Window Somewhere
12. (Secret Instrumental)
13. Quiet The Room
14. You Are My House

Skullcrusher is, by all accounts, an exploration of the ways you become yourself when you aren’t looking - and how that feels once you start paying attention. It’s a quiet power; a hushed celebration of the tiny, understated subtleties that culminate into knowing yourself.

On her debut EP, songwriter Helen Ballentine offers an airy, intense and unflinchingly open collection of songs written about - and from - one of life’s in-between grey areas, a stretch of uncertainty and unemployment and the subsequent search for identity. Here, as Skullcrusher, Ballentine grapples with how to communicate her private self to an audience. 

The four dark, dreamy songs on her debut EP were influenced by a strange-but-fitting amalgamation of media consumed in the immediate aftermath of quitting her 9-5. There’s Valerie and her Week of Wonders, the Czech newwave film that went on to inform Skullcrusher’s aesthetic. There’s Ballentine’s love of fantasy and surrealism, her appreciation of the way fantasy novels juxtapose beauty and violence.

Skullcrusher’s understated energy radiates with the atmosphere of waking up to the quiet terror of shapeless, structureless days but it finds power in eschewing the pressures of careerism and a vapid culture of productivity. Instead, as Skullcrusher, Ballentine has the audacity to be comfortable enough with herself and to simply accept the unknown as her life.

TRACK LISTING

Places/Plans
Trace
Two Weeks In December
Day Of Show