After living in constant motion for the better part of ten years, though, Linaberry found himself at an unexpected standstill in 2021. At the time, he and his wife had recently relocated from Brooklyn to an old farmhouse in the Catskills, and the change of pace was both rewarding and challenging all at once.

“It’s a pretty remote, rural area we moved to,” Linabery explains, “the kind of place where spring is just a continuation of the cold, grey, muddy, brown of winter. I was exhausted by the seasons, working on songs nine hours a day in the attic, and it all felt very isolated and insular.”

Where the most recent Bones of J.R. Jones release, 2021’s A Celebration, drew inspiration from a trip into the vast, desert expanses of the American southwest, the songs that began taking shape in upstate New York this time around were more difficult to pin down, seeming to come and go of their own accord.

“That’s where the notion of ‘slow lightning’ was born,” Linaberry explains. “It’s about a power you can’t control, a force that’s bigger than you and follows its own path no matter how badly you want to mold or direct it. That’s what this record felt like, and it’s something I had to figure out how to embrace.”

That kind of all-consuming power is palpable from the start on Slow Lightning, which begins with the boisterous “Animals.” Gritty and insistent, the track taps into something primal and uninhibited, learning to trust its gut and make peace with aiming high and sometimes falling short. “Well my heart’s just trying to kill me,” Linaberry sings over roiling guitars and drums. “It always vibrates above / With always grand notions / But it plays in the mud.” Like so much of the album, it’s a testament to resilience, to letting go of failure and pressing on even when things feel hopeless. The bittersweet title track explores tenacity in the face of disenchantment, while the lo-fi “Blue Skies” insists on reaching for hope regardless of the cost, and “The Flood” conjures up a wistful portrait of survival and loss as it builds from a dreamy blur into a searing crescendo.

“I remember lying in bed in the dark hearing the coyotes laughing out in the field behind our house just before they killed something,” Linaberry recalls. “It was so haunting and eerie, but at the same time, you’re just so totally in awe of what’s happening right outside your window, this elemental moment of life and death all wrapped up together.”

Despite the looming sense of danger that permeates the album, Slow Lightning still manages to find moments of humor and levity. The darkly romantic “I’ll See You In Hell” revels in a love so strong it carries on through eternal damnation; the sardonic “I Ain’t Through With You” gets high on an addictively toxic relationship; and the relentlessly taut “Heaven Help Me” surrenders to overwhelming infatuation, with Linaberry recalling, “Love is the kind of thing that will keep you warm / That’s what she said / As she was burning down my home.”

In the end, though, it’s perhaps the breezy “Salt Sour Sweet” that best encapsulates the spirit of the record, with Linaberry looking back on a lifetime of love and heartbreak, dreams and disappointment, success and failure, and ultimately recognizing that it’s the grand sum of them all that make us who we are. “It’s the salt sour and sweet / That holds,” he sings in an airy falsetto. Call it maturity, call it self-awareness; it’s the kind of wisdom that can only arrive on a bolt of Slow Lightning.

Ruen Brothers

After their Rick-Rubin-produced debut album, and a self-produced second record featuring songs they’d written for an award winning Netflix film, Ruen Brothers emerged with a powerful and timeless ode to Western classics on their 2023 ‘Ten Paces’. Showcasing their mixing, mastering, writing and soundscape design talents, the British
duo hit neo-noir gold on the ten song collection – their first for Yep Roc Records – with classic melodies and dulcet, soaring vocal tones, laced with western guitar motifs and reverberant production.

Inspired by their dad’s record collection, brothers Rupert and Henry covered the likes of Charlie Feathers, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry and The Everly Brothers in the smoke-laced working men’s pubs of their industrial hometown. Since initial discovery via the BBC, Ruen Brothers have opened for artists such as Greta Van Fleet and Orville Peck, garnered a wealth of radio airplay around the US and toured from East to West between recording sessions. 2023 saw them land on multiple Billboard and radio charts with their new record ‘Ten Paces’.

No Depression:
“They’re well versed in the source of the musical rivers in which they were raised, but they’re excited by the direction of new tributaries along the way. It’s how they carry labels of both timeless and timely throughout a full set of songs.”

Paste Magazine:
“Inspired by western noir and the dark void that so perfectly pairs alt-country with brooding cinemascapes, Henry and Rupert have hit a new milestone with Ten Paces.”