Skullcrusher: And your song is like a circle Tour 2026

In the organizer's words:

And Your Song is Like a Circle, the second album from New York-based artist Skullcrusher, aka Helen Ballentine, winds its way into an ever-changing, unstable core. Recorded piecemeal over several years - following the release of her acclaimed debut Quiet the Room (2022), And Your Song is Like a Circle doesn't capture an experience, but hints at the imprint of an experience that can't be captured. Oscillating between floating folk and crystalline electronic sounds, somewhere in the snowy landscapes shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle explores how grief turns inwards. The loss itself becomes as real and tangible as that which has been lost.

Ballentine began writing Circle after she left Los Angeles. A city she had called home for almost a decade. She eventually returned to upstate New York, to the Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised. Several years of intense isolation followed, during which Ballentine immersed herself deeply in movies, books and art that reflected the disruption of a cross-country move and its dissociative aftermath.

Throughout the album, the line between human and machine is blurred. On "Maelstrom", voices collide between echoing drum beats like water in a cave. The vocal filigree work on "Exhale" fans out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. "Dragon" lets a piano reverberate over tight, pressed percussion.

Whereas Skullcrusher's first album captured the richly detailed intimacies of domestic space, Circle is vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skims the event horizon in long, slow movements. These songs vibrate with the fervor of trying to capture a moment, to draw a circle around it. "I like to think of my work as a collection," Ballentine says. "At some point it might form a circle. Every time I make something, I draw another line around the whole work. It feels like I've been trying to trace it my whole life."

Presented by: ByteFM and Rolling Stone