The Irish musician’s solo debut draws on the aesthetics of field recordings for understated, slow-burning experimental pop that prompts its own meditation on the creative process.
As a founding member of Cork band the Altered Hours and a collaborator in projects like Crevice, Howlbux, and Morning Veils, Elaine Howley has spanned impressive territory in the Irish musical underground. On her solo debut, The Distance Between Heart and Mouth, the singer and musician turns to twilit experimental pop as she muses on closeness and in-between worlds. Recorded on a 4-track cassette machine and released by Belfast label Touch Sensitive, it’s an ad hoc collection of songs that draw their muted power from everyday ritual—a testament to the magic of not making plans.
The idea for the album originated with a 2018 series on Cosmosis, Howley’s fortnightly show on Dublin Digital Radio, where she invited listeners to submit unfinished material for broadcast and aired her own spacey moodboard of field recordings and drone. With this, a door swung open. Relinquishing end goals and self-judgment, the Tipperary artist committed to recording each day in the spare room of her Cork home. Across nine lamp-lit tracks, she casts a shadow play that feels like a spiritual sequel to the lo-fi avant-pop of Crevice’s 2017 debut In Heart. Opener “Silent Talk” packs a thrifty glow via cozy Omnichord shapes and widescreen analog synth; “Autumn Speak” builds on the almost diaristic energy. Beneath a web of whirling ambience, overdubbed toms, and scorched lead guitar, elliptical refrains (“I won’t ever be nice again/You won’t ever ask twice again”) zig-zag between transfixing and foreboding.
Howley’s songwriting voice has long felt autonomous to the point of defiance. A refrain in the Altered Hours’ song “Thistle” doubles as a warning: “I’m not your snowdrop/I’m a thistle.” Here, that spirit is pared down to a cosmic swoon that plays with closeness and distance in the realm of revelation. Originally featured on Touch Sensitive’s 2019 compilation Wacker That, “Song for Mary Black” is a looped paean to the eponymous Irish folk singer that holds space for the overlap between womanhood and childhood memory. A soulful peak driven by a submerged Latin shuffle, “To the Test” feels more akin to a cosmic tête-à-tête than an open letter. “Silent Talk” is more transparent: “It took me 16 weeks to look you in the eye,” Howley murmurs. The subtle tension between specificity and obscurity feels like a real payoff.
For all their dusky charm, these songs were not born of the night. In a recent interview, Howley cited the example of Irish novelist Kevin Barry, who treats writing as “a first-thing-in-the-morning practice.” Likewise, Howley said, she made it her daily mission to “play a little bit, even if it’s a small bit.” It accounts for the album’s heavy hypnopompic glow, a mood that’s astral to the point of being analgesic. Like a dream half-sketched upon waking, the pitched-down vocals and spliced drum machines of “Archeological Longing” dovetail with “Buried Way Out,” where arachnoid guitar shapes and Julia Holter-like spoken word summon a sphere far beyond Howley’s spare room. Conjuring Leslie Winer, the skeletal dub of “See Saw Seen” goes further yet, oscillating tape delay until it stretches into a trance. Summoned each morning before the world had any chance of weighing in, The Distance Between Heart and Mouth is a spectral slow burn that refuses to trip over itself to get anywhere in particular. By absorbing the wisdom of the process, Howley permits her craft to resound deeper than ever.
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