Skullcrusher defies the idea that soft music can’t be devastatingly intense

On her intimate second album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, the New York artist conjures a heavy sense of desolation.

Skullcrusher was living in a sweltering apartment in New York’s Hudson Valley during the summer of 2023, when the region was infested by spongy moths. They swarmed outside and crept in through her windows, flying around her apartment. Each night, she shooed them out of her bedroom – until one morning, she awoke to find them all dead. She was living alone and didn’t leave the apartment for days. When she thinks back to that time, she recalls feeling ensnared and isolated. “I found many reasons to trap myself and keep myself in that feeling for a while,” she remembers. “It was really hot and sweaty and closed-in. I could have walked through the moths, but I didn’t want to.”

This claustrophobic, dissociative feeling seeps potently into the singer-songwriter’s eerie and contemplative second album, And Your Song is Like a Circle. When we speak, Helen Ballentine – who now lives in Queens, New York – is visiting her mum and brother in Mount Vernon, the suburb she grew up in, 20 miles north of New York City. She recounts how the October album release feels like the culmination of a deeply transformative few years. 

Shortly before her first album arrived in 2022, a breakup catalysed her departure from LA, the city she had called home for nearly a decade. Looking back, leaving the city caused her greater heartbreak than the breakup itself – but the change was necessary for her to grow. “It was my home,” she reflects. “I had family there. I had friends there. I was at an age where I had figured a lot of things out, but they were really resting on something that was not quite figured out inside me. When I started really digging into myself, a lot of things on the surface started to fall away.” The emptiness and disconnection that stirred in her continue to echo through her music, lending a desolate weight to her atmospheric folk.

Influenced by the warm analogue ambient of Boards of Canada and Autechre, as well as the intimate, introspective folk of Nick Drake, Ballentine’s sound is often described as soft or ethereal – but she rejects the notion that quiet music can’t be heavy at the same time. In the same vein as artists like Grouper and Julianna Barwick, there is a grounding core of devastation in her music. “If you look at somebody like Nick Drake, he was making some of the heaviest, most metal songs of all time,” Ballentine says, “but if you put them on in the background for a commercial for a garden store, then you’re gonna perceive it differently.”

“I really feel that what I’m making is heavy,” she adds, noting that people often misunderstand soft or quiet music, especially when it’s made by women. “It’s very common for people to be confused about how this music could be heavy for me. There’s a heaviness for me in my experience. If the music is soft and quiet, it’s maybe not literally heavy, but there are all different kinds of heaviness.”

Her Skullcrusher moniker does, of course, imply an element of sonic weight, or pummelling low-end pressure. It has confounded some listeners – mostly men, surprise – who expect her to be making lurching doom metal, not wispy, vulnerable folk. “I know I brought that on myself, but there were a lot of old dudes being like, ‘I don’t get it. You’re so small,’” she says. “I can make things that are intense. Intensity doesn’t have anything to do with size or volume. People do know that, but they forget sometimes.”

Instead of a love of thrashing grindcore, the name was actually born from techno raves in San Francisco. When her best friend studied at Stanford University, she would drive out to visit, and the two would go raving in platformed leather boots they referred to as their “Skullcrusher shoes”. At one point, after befriending a DJ in college, Ballentine imagined she might become a DJ herself. She created the Skullcrusher moniker while teaching herself to mix My Bloody Valentine with Skee Mask or Autechre, but the project never quite took off. Instead, deciding she preferred writing her own music, she turned her attention to folk and ambient sounds. These days, she finds raves too crowded and overwhelming, but techno left a lasting impression. She traces her passion for electronic music – evident on her latest record in the melancholy wash of synths and trip-hop-indebted drum machines that propel it – back to nights spent raving in those platformed shoes.

After graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in graphic design, Ballentine embarked on a career as a studio artist. She got a job in a gallery, but found herself increasingly drawn to music in her spare time. One of her most visceral childhood memories is sitting at the piano, which she played from the age of five. Reflecting on the role music had played in her life, she started to feel “there was more of a path forward” in music than in art. She quit her job and, over a long summer of unemployment, started writing the songs that would form her 2020 Skullcrusher EP – a devastatingly confessional work about first loves and fraught relationships, filtered through a spectral folk lens. “It wasn’t like I decided not to be a visual artist any more,” she says now. “Whatever I was wanting to create just came out more easily in song form.” 

She further established her deeply felt sound on 2021 EP Storm in Summer, which includes a tender homage to her hero, Nick Drake. Ballentine’s first album as Skullcrusher, Quiet the Room, arrived in October 2022, unfurling her introspective, insular sound across 14 tracks exploring childhood, dissociation and the memories that gently haunt us. The album was well received, but by the time it came out, everything in Ballentine’s life had changed.

She originally flew back to the east coast in the summer of 2022 – with just a few belongings and her cat, Finn – to play a string of concerts, including Newport Folk Festival. She ended up staying with her mother, escaping into the warm nostalgia of the Studio Ghibli films she watched as a kid. Eventually, Ballentine moved into her own apartment in Hudson, where she found a strange comfort in the films of David Lynch and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s cult 90s horror, Cure, where a serial killer hypnotises people to commit murders. “There are a lot of dissociative themes [on the album], a lot of references to films I was watching, which connects to the dissociation of trying to process my experience through a character and trying to see myself,” she says. 

This sense of detachment and alienation – the blurring of consciousness and unconsciousness – courses throughout Ballentine’s music. She has been thinking a lot about dreams, and how people and places can go on existing long after they’ve vanished. “When you are remembering something, sometimes it’ll resurface in your dreams,” she says, reflecting on her recently recurring dreams of LA, “and that’s the only place you can perceive it any more.” To capture this surreal sense of unreality, she recorded parts of And Your Song… using contact mics attached to her throat, creating dissociated, intentionally “scary sounds”. Electronic beats harmonise with skeletal, finger-picked guitar and austere piano to establish a contrast between human and machine, real versus synthesised. 

This tension between human sounds and synthetic ones is also keenly expressed through her fascination with “crying or sighing or screaming” on the record. Album opener, March, features a melodic cry that echoes as if from within a church before being submerged beneath crashing waves of sound. The resigned sighs at the start of Living fan out into layered, harmonising voices that collide over lucid acoustic guitar and piano. Maelstrom opens with a discordant cry, its voices clashing over a barely audible scream. “I was thinking about the layers of your perception of yourself,” she recalls. “There are all these voices, and they’re rarely lined up perfectly; they’re often doing different things.” 

While writing And Your Song…, Ballentine kept picturing the process of drawing a circle: an endless looping motion similar to retracing the lines of a memory. “You keep your hands steady, and you just move the pencil around the page,” she explains, “but it takes many times around to get there. I like that as a way to think about transitions in life and making music. Every time I make something, I’m taking another pass at that movement.” The album’s merging of multiple vocal tracks becomes like a multilayered drawing.

Just as it comes in handy for describing her approach to retracing memories, Ballentine’s background as a visual artist is also present in her lyrics, where allusions to sketching and drawing often surface. “Am I living? In the details of a drawing,” she sings on Living, capturing those feelings of dissociation once more. “I think a lot of what I draw starts from an abstract place of finding a shape or a face,” she says. “The way I interpret thoughts or feelings often comes in a visual way. That influences my lyrics and how I produce as well.”

Just as an errant line in one of Ballentine’s sketches might take a piece of visual art in a completely different direction, she also welcomes the same happy accidents in her music. One of her favourite moments on And Your Song… comes on Dragon, where she plays a wrong note on the piano, and turns it into something else entirely. These leftover lines and mistakes are what makes art human. 

“I really like the way it looks when you leave all those circular shapes there and you don’t erase anything,” Ballentine concludes. “You just have these spiralling movements of the pencil that feel like they show the whole process of getting there.” As AI threatens to strip away the process to offer a clean, soulless art product, Skullcrusher’s lush yet visceral sound – at times so intimate you feel as though you are in the room with her – is a reminder that even the smallest creative moments sometimes leave the deepest marks.