No Glory

Shortly after the release of their gorgeous debut EP Again, There last year, Brooklyn songwriter h. pruz (Hannah Pruzinsky) upended their whole life. After the end of a long-term relationship, they fell deep into the throes of new love; they quit their full-time job to spend most of their time playing music. What was left in the ashes of that old life was a beautiful, fulfilling new one, but first they had to untangle the grief and the guilt that came with leaving it all behind—the result of that being the nine-song album, No Glory. Lyrically, No Glory derives its power by touching on a range of pivotal moments from different emotional vantages. A widely revered voice in the NYC indie-folk scene, Pruzinsky’s rare talents include the patience and allergy to artifice and overstatement in their songwriting. They take cues from similarly restrained but inimitable voices like Diane Cluck with her pastoral “intuitive folk,” Adrianne Lenker and her open-veined word association, along with the plainspoken catharsis of Lomelda and the sotto voce confessions of Sufjan Stevens.

The production on No Glory feels as bright and accommodating as the songwriting. Infringing on the clarity of the guitar and voice—sometimes built from Pruzinsky’s first-shot demo takes—are faint glissandos of synths, winds, and incidental noise tucked away in corners of the stereo image. It directly evokes the space in which it was largely written and recorded: a small cabin in upstate New York with no running water. Co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Felix Walworth (Told Slant, Florist) and Pruzinsky favoured echoey room mics in the mix, making the space itself feel like a voice in the music.