by Caroline Nieto (@caroline.nieto)
Each year, hemlock’s Carolina Chauffe picks a month where they write a new song each day. A hot dog from home depot, the first signs of a Midwestern winter, and the last oat milk carton are among the daily mundanities that serve as hemlock’s muses. The practice takes the pressure off of mannered, cautious songwriting, yielding a “first thought, best thought” process, as Chauffe stated in their interview with MAPS earlier this year. The songs are strikingly bare iPhone recordings, typically consisting only of Chauffe’s voice and acoustic guitar. You can hear strings buzzing and chairs scraping—the ticket of entry into hemlock’s finely tuned sound. Their newest album, 444, is the culmination of these albums’ highlights, reimagining these demos with a full-scale band and production process.
The opening track, “Day One,” exemplifies the quintessential hemlock sound. It’s the first song Chauffe ever wrote for their song-a-month project, a heralding of their new creative landscape. Compared to the demo version on February, there’s a present gap between the hemlock of 2019 and 2024. Their voice is stronger, guitar more self assured, but the integrity of the sound remains. When Chauffe’s voice overlaps in rounds to close out the song, it’s a duet of past and present.
Winding to a start with a steel guitar, “Hyde Park” is the kind of earthy, playful song that hails the beginning of autumn. The track is adorned with a brushed snare sound, like a softly crunching forest took the percussive reins. “Hyde Park” is all about trying, failing, and falling. Making mistakes and making them again. While they could succumb to the failure, hemlock refuses to backpedal—everything in the song pushes forth, tumbling to a possible future. It’s a brisk walk to the new, where “Nervous over nothing” is followed by “Hoping for a something.”
“Hyde Park” is just the first of hemlock’s songs that flourish with added production. “Depot Dog,” originally from the album, October, is a model indie rock track, complete with a crunchy/clean electric guitar sound and vocals oozing with personality. While hemlock’s demos are typically left unpolished, this record gives them freedom to play with volume and atmosphere. They lean into a heaviness that’s been bursting from their more sullen tracks. Notably, “Full” gets a whole new life in its album version, the band rivaling the petulance of Chauffe’s vocals, which completely dominate the track. With each repetition of “Fill my plate I’ll do the dishes, darlin,” the song self-aggravates, until the refrain comes in—a sustained chromatic whine like a head-bang come to life.
No moment in the record is as gratifying as the opening of “Hazards,” when Chauffe belts the catastrophic, “You gotta be kidding me!” This line stands out in the album May as a sudden spurt of heat in an otherwise mellow track run. Only this time, the band falls into step and distortion abounds, descending into complete catharsis. The sound oscillates between this total mania and a chilling calm, like the silence after the storm.
The natural world is synonymous with hemlock’s work, from lyrics down to the melodies they erect. For them, nature represents something intangible, such as in the song “Sky Baby,” which positions its subject as a perpetual horizon. As Chauffe sings so gently, “If you were a mountain/I would be your fog/Wrap round you each mornin/Share our every dawn.” The use of the natural world here indicates an inexplicable devotion, something as natural as the morning dew. But sometimes, nature is the subject and all else falls into place around it. “Lake Martin” is an elegy of earthly appreciation, or in Chauffe’s words, “an ode to the swamp that helped raise me.” They approach nature with a devastating tenderness, aware of its impossible vastness and humble before its abundance. Once again, hemlock is ever growing with the world around them, singing, “All changing surely, all moving subtly /All of a sudden, overcoming /Awed and humbled by the beauty of it all.”