Desert Liminal - Black Ocean (2024) [Hi-Res]

Desert Liminal is a team –– tight-knit, cooperative, and bound by a sterling trust in music’s ability to shine a light into the darkest depths. The Chicago band’s primary songwriter and vocalist Sarah Jane Quillin may be the heart of the project, but as such, she is a heart that beats for her bandmates Mallory Linehan and Rob Logan, and the underground scene that has cradled them all and provided a source of profound psychic exploration and a sense of purpose.

The songs on the group’s third full-length, Black Ocean, primarily reflect on Quillin’s inner life during the chaotic years following the death of a loved one, lost to the spiral of addiction. It was during this time that Quillin cut her teeth playing in the Chicago DIY scene, drumming in Heavy Dreams with her dear friend and mentor Emily Kempf (DEHD). As Quillin explains it, it was music and the adjoining community that bolstered her through the turbulent beginnings of an adulthood “mired in the bureaucracy of navigating the medical system, then death, grief, dissociation, depression and finally with enough time (and DIY shows) healing.”

Black Ocean is appropriately stirring, at times reminiscent of early Sinead O’Connor or late Beach House or contemporaries like Tempers. These songs are brimming with deeply-felt melodies and memorable hooks, equal parts haunted and uplifting –– epic, driving pop music coaxed from swirling violin, synthesizers, live and synthetic drums and dazzling vocal harmonies.

Throughout Black Ocean, the band’s love of music and appreciation for its uplifting potential begins to double back on itself, taking on even more layers of simultaneous universality and specificity. Quillin’s songs are commonly love letters to friends, reflections of shared moments both idyllic and hellish. This in fact extends to her bandmates themselves. “Kid Detroit” is written for Desert Liminal drummer (and Detroit native) Rob Logan, who has expanded his longtime contribution to include synth textures and production on the new record. It details, with stirring nostalgia, a touring experience half a decade ago when Quillin and Logan were both thrashed by heartbreak and loss. “It's funny to miss the times when you were younger and a total wreck,” Quillin says. But this is exactly Desert Liminal’s strength. The melody is bittersweet, catchy and touching and the lyrics are tender and poetic descriptions of this miserable time, abstracted and turned into something frankly pretty. “Black ocean, back I go,” Quillin sings over and over during the chorus. Desert Liminal succeeds in alchemizing these bleak moments into something beautiful and distant, bigger than “us,” a beautiful landscape.

“Call Me Your Wasteland” is an ode to Quillin’s bandmate and vocal mentor Mallory Linehan whose shimmering harmonies and swirling, looping violin and guitar have profoundly deepened the Desert Liminal pallet. Quillin calls it “a simple song that projects my own youthful memories onto Mallory’s endless touring schedule, reminiscing on the search for love and connection on the road.” Linehan’s classically-trained but noise scene-influenced violin playing shines here as a stunning complement to Quillin’s dreaming aloud. It seems to play the part of the “radio love song” that gets turned up loud beneath “a laugh with the band / sounding better than any man.” Linehan’s playing may be familiar from her work writing and composing full-band arrangements for her solo project, Chelsea Bridge.

Fans of Lower Dens, Alvvays, Slowdive, and Midwife will find much to love in Black Ocean’s hypnagogic but dynamic and memorable style. But Desert Liminal are doing more than carving out a space for themselves alongside their contemporaries. These songs are so personal –– they so vividly live and breathe at this particular intersection of people that is Desert Liminal –– that they simply could not have been sung by anyone else.