Carve by Kathryn Mohr

For fans of Amiture Music, Slint, My Bloody Valentine, classic grunge, and taking a long, lonely drive to clear your head, Carve by Kathryn Mohr meditates on the connection between love and grief by embodying the ghost of accessible alternative rock. Aesthetically, this intensely minimal sound fills out its backdrops through heavily processed guitars of all kinds, spanning from the lush noise of shoegaze to the spindly picking of folk. These riffs start at familiar punk and grunge territory before veering off into dissonance and suspension, a pivot which always reminds us of these tracks’ ultimately lonesome nature behind a veneer of heavy signal processing. Largely performed from an isolated perspective, these songs constantly weigh the love gained through friendship against the grief ahead at the inevitable end, an emotionally complex trade off which haunts younger generations today. To love requires vulnerability, opening ourselves to loss, humiliation, and ruin in the service of something essential to a fulfilled life.