Izzy Camina is awake, but only just. After getting up and crushing some poorly-made coffee in her LA home, she stares up into the sky, hoping the blue light outside will offer some additional sustenance. When NME calls, the laughter on the other end of the line betrays a 24-year-old for whom four hours’ sleep is entirely manageable. “I’m a ten hour girl, but fuck it,” she giggles again, freshly caffeinated and ready to take on the world.
It’s the kind of energy that burns through ‘UP N DOWN’, the singer’s first single that dropped back in December. A paean to the saturnalia of youth and all the lows that come after, the bass-driven track captured something most of us were feeling: an unshakeable impression that we might be dancing through end times. “Humanity is sick,” she sings, “but it feels so much better when you seal it with a kiss.” It’s unmistakably the work of a young artist who’s already experienced her share of highs and lows.
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“What is it about a bonfire?” The opening question from Phil Elverum’s press notes for Lost Wisdom Pt. 2 is one that haunts the latest Mount Eerie album from start to finish, an elegiac motif that returns to the word “smoldering” twice on its journey. It’s a term that invariably carries a sense of interlocation, though its passing is noted both ways: when we think of a smoldering romance, it evokes the presence of flame waxing, ascendant; when we think of a smoldering bonfire, we mourn what’s left of the light in its embers.
Matthew Neale 