Songs for Winter Longings

Welcome to #2 of our Annotated Playlist series, curated by the Hot Knife staff. Listen on Spotify at the bottom of this page. If you’re interested in submitting your (or your clients’) music for consideration for our playlists, please email us at hotknifemag@gmail.com.

Winter is: collapse, loneliness, long dark empty afternoons, the sun going down at 3 PM, so much quiet, so much yelling/noise/bursting-at-the-seamsness of the holidays, so much terrible and stinging memory, the crucible and nightmare of family and of home and of return, the sometimes-joy sometimes-exhaustion of family and home and return, hot drinks scalding your tongue and fuzzy socks pulled up and loss piling up in corners and icy attics and warming your old loneliness in the microwave. Winter is boredom and sleeping-to-avoid-living and also sometimes smudges of beauty, of snow-flushed faces and surprising sunlight. I don’t know. There’s so much, and every winter reminds me of this passage since I first read it, from Katherine May’s Wintering (a beautiful book):

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximizing scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.”

Here are some songs for winter. For the “crucible” of the life cycle, not necessarily the death.

“It’s Like a Secret” — Skullcrusher

I am obsessed with Skullcrusher (aka Helen Ballentine). If I remember correctly, I think I discovered her via one of Phoebe Bridgers’ IG stories, but maybe that memory isn’t accurate, who knows. Quiet the Room is her first full-length album, and it is a ghostly, bruising, odd, completely gorgeous sort of project, all dream-space and slow creepings of longing/nostalgia/pain. Ballentine’s voice is soft and honestly the definition of “ethereal.” Her lyricism, though, is the headiest part—its beauty wafting in only inch by inch, after you’ve listened to each song a few times. Listening to Skullcrusher, and specifically “It’s Like a Secret,” demands ritual, in a way, which is what I associate with winter anyways: ritual, decomposition, coldness, the decaying of old wounds and the freezing-over of others. “It’s Like a Secret” sums up that secret, inarticulable sensation for me, of sensing feelings that cannot quite be communicated but must be felt, nonetheless.

“Nostalgia” — Alice Phoebe Lou

We love Alice Phoebe Lou at Hot Knife. She is a brilliant witch of a musician and performer and lyricist. This song, in particular, is equally ethereal and kind of tenderly haunting in the same way Skullcrusher’s music is, at its best. The song begins with: “Suspended in nostalgia / I find your name hanging in my memories / I fill myself up with your gaze / Oh what a maze you’ve put me in.” Lou sings these words gently, but they fill the room, still—against what we can only call extremely dreamy instrumentals that should be played, it feels, in a chapel, somewhere with high ceilings and lots of afternoon winter light pouring in, a place of worship (honestly I believe more in music than any god). I think about this thing our fav cynic Susan Sontag said, maybe one of the best chroniclers of the dangers/precipices/fervor for nostalgia, specifically about photographs: “All photographs are memento mori.” Maybe that’s true. Maybe music has its own relationship to death and the freeze-frame it suspends, distills, tries to hold; there is motion, but it’s cupped between palms, only a few minutes’ worth. Is this rambling incoherent? Probably. But anyways. This is a love song for nostalgia and also a signal fire; this is an acknowledgment of the memento mori laced into every moment of remembering.

“Salt Circle” — Eliza McLamb

Oh my GOODNESS I fucking adore Eliza McLamb’s music. Also, listen to Binchtopia if you haven’t already—she co-hosts. McLamb is truly one of the best contemporary songwriters, and her new EP—titled Salt Circle—is the highest evidence of that talent. “Salt Circle” is probably my favorite song on the EP, along with “Pulp,” because, well, just read the opening lyrics: “‘I could never do that’ / Many men have said to me While they’re watching me cry / Or talking to myself in my sleep.” Being an unruly-hearted, unromanticizably (not a word but it should be) lonely and over-feeling, love-hungry and simultaneously avoidant femme person who sometimes engages in romantic relationships with men…that pain and unevenness and sheer fundamental disconnect of narrative, of language, is distilled into these lines. This song is a salt circle in itself: tenderness bleeding from every sacred or silly or made-up ritual we offer to the people we love, how we try to knit our people into belovedness like a protective armor, as if anything could keep any of us really truly safe forever. I wish loving someone could shield them from pain, from the gruesome parts of life, from all of it, but I also know it cannot, and “Salt Circle” makes me quite weepy because of this knowledge. It is a love song without the gloss and mythos of romance, of some unending story of immaculate closeness: “Trading braiding hair in your bedroom / I’ll salt circle your brain if I have to / It doesn’t feel quite right to call you a friend/ When we take on new bodies I will scour the earth to find you again.” I mean, ok, what the fuck—are you kidding me?! What gave her the right to write this kind of brutal poetry?!!! Anyways. Her voice is also so lovely, reminds me quite a bit of Phoebe but also is entirely her own. Just please please listen to this whole EP as soon as you can, maybe with someone you love a lot.

“Growing Pain” — Rahill

We just recently discovered Rahill’s music at Hot Knife, and we love it. This song is funkier than the others on this list—meaning, it’s got a quirky/fun/irreverent kind of Okay Kaya-type beat and feeling. There are layers of weird and interesting sounds happening over Rahill’s coy voice and they coalesce, build, to produce the kind of song you definitely want to Walk Down The Street In Funky Boots To. I don’t know; maybe that’s not a ubiquitous feeling, whatever. Growing IS painful and I think, in an oblique way, this song expresses a lot of the strangeness of winter, of growing that feels a lot more like cracking open, like a slow and messy shedding of outgrown feelings.

“I’m Embarrassed I Still Think of You” — NoSo

NoSo is such a uniquely talented, delightful artist—we highly recommend watching their (amazing) Tiny Desk concert. They’re an incredible, often witty, often deeeeeply and achingly insightful musician—both a gifted guitarist and singer-songwriter. Their songs could probably be most easily described as indie pop, but I think it’s more complex than that, since their songs feel so versatile, moving smoothly from more electric-guitar-heavy grungy-poppy angst (“David”) to tender lush layered-harmonies/Clairo’s-Sling-esque songs like this one; their album Stay Proud Of Me came out last summer, and I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. THIS fucking song cleaves me open, is indeed embarrassingly relatable, its repetition not boring but rather, depicting the sheer exhaustion and shame and longing that comes with not-getting-over-someone-but-pretending-to-because-you-really-really-should’ve-by-now. You know the vibe, probably. This verse particularly stings: “I can still smell the chemicals / Wafting from squares, hear a red light humming / I admit that wasn’t love / Not even close, but I still think of you.” Yes: you can know, deeply, that something was decidedly not love, and yet. And yet you still think of them. The feelings linger even as you know they aren’t enough. Winter always drags all the muck up from the bottom of the creek and forces us to wade through it. Winter always freezes certain longings into place that I would rather melt away.

“Echo Park” — Bedouine

Bedouine makes such lovely, sun-drenched music; her songs always sweeten things, inflecting even my shittiest moods with some slight nudging towards warmth. The Hot Knife staff unanimously loves her for this reason. She makes soft, incantatory, gentle-but-poignant folk music that reminds me of the Velvet Underground in some ways, but also of Joni Mitchell, and very very often Leonard Cohen. “Echo Park” haunts and softens the heart at the same time, which is what usually happens with Bedouine’s music; her precise language and intricate guitar arrangements enable her to shift from the life-affirming parts of longing to the lonelier rougher parts. She’s an inimitable artist because of that flexibility, because of the warmth that can become the memory-of-warmth. She describes what tends to comprise most of my winters at home in LA: “While my love's away at work / I'll bob and weave through the styled streets of Sunset Boulevard.” Simple, mundane imagery, but she renders each line almost sacred, cyclical, ritual-like. And yes: walking down Sunset, or through Echo Park, or wherever, in your hometown in the winter—65 degree “winter,” that is—can become a ritual that sustains and keeps us afloat here.

“Pink Balloon” — Samia

Samia is one of my favorite contemporary artists and I have been restlessly waiting for new music from her. The Baby, her debut album, is so so so good—clever, equal parts lovestruck and raging, funny and also absolutely devastating (“Is There Something In The Movies”) brimming with strange-yet-perfect lyrical idiosyncrasies that seem to define Samia’s work. Her first new single off her upcoming album Honey was “Kill Her Freak Out,” which is a perfect song—gutting, but perfect, with that typical hyper-specific and somehow magical/visceral lyricism Samia always delivers, full of often surprising juxtapositions of imagery that might seem, with any other artist, not to quite work, but it does, always, for her songs. “Pink Balloon” is another such song, a bit of a quiet lonely piano ballad, a bit of a love song: “I’m trying to make you laugh / Sweating like an acrobat / Sometimes I speak on your behalf / I’m nervous on the full moon.” She has a way of delivering each line with such quiet, seemingly effortless longing—I mean that you can literally hear it in her voice, trembling and fierce even as soft as she says each word. She’ll drag out a certain word and go up into a higher key for a moment and it’ll knot in your gut, make you feel something, every time.