Light rarely leaks into Kathryn Mohr’s songs. Since her early recordings, the Bay Area musician has paired minimal arrangements—shadowy acoustic guitars, icy synthwork, and ghostly field recordings—with delicate yet desperate delivery, as if every whisper and gasp were being squeezed out of her by the weight of the world bearing down on her chest. Her lyrics are cryptic and imagistic, and rarely suggest much optimism; each song is a puzzle box that only snaps open to reveal a world of pain.
Mohr’s last album—2025’s Waiting Room—was made at an artist retreat in a rural village in Iceland. She has said that recording outside the rhythms of her daily life is a practical choice, a way to “focus more and make new connections with my brain.” But every day she recorded until her body hurt, and you can hear the self-imposed isolation and introspection in every song on that album; each drifting piece feels like a meditation where you can’t seem to get your darkest thoughts out of your head. Her new record, Carve, was born under similar conditions. Decamping to the Mojave desert, she worked from a Western-themed Airbnb; stillness and remoteness once again became central to the record’s atmosphere.
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On Carve, despondency and desolation remain her default modes. The record opens with a windswept, grayscale instrumental called “Bone Infection,” on which dizzy synthesizer ambiance is scarred with chattering found sounds and static. It feels as grim and ghostly as the title would suggest, an ominous harbinger of the pieces that follow. Across the record’s 12 tracks, Mohr sings of illness and death, of poisoned water, of bad trips and broken bones. The images are often foggy and abstract, but the message is clear. As she sings on “Idiocy”—a track full of cloudy acoustic yearning that recalls Grouper’s more desperate dirges—“I’m suffering the pain, it’s all I have.” It’s a simple line that plays like a mission statement for all the downcast songs she’s made to date: Things may be bad, but what are you gonna do?
At its highest points, Carve provides an angry rejoinder to that kind of defeatism. The record often feels like a sharper-edged revision of Mohr’s sound. “Owner,” like the record’s trio of instrumental tracks (“Bone Infection,” the aqueous “Chromium 6,” and the frigid closer “crow eyes”), introduces prickly dissonance and concrète experimentation as an additional layer of unsettling atmosphere. Meanwhile, songs like “Angle of Repose,” “Cells,” and “Property” introduce a new kind of extremity, trudging through a distorted sludge that recalls doom-influenced experimenters like Earth and BIG|BRAVE.
Mohr uses these more in-the-red tracks as the opportunity to unleash bellowing vocal delivery that she’s seldom explored before. Even if the themes of the lyrics are similar, the wide-eyed intensity, and even rage, suggest there is more to her perspective than a desire to sink into the mud of modern life. On “Property,” she sings of desperately climbing a ladder in the hopes of reaching “a pinpoint of light from above.” Images like that—paired with her more dogged energy on some of these tracks—suggest there is hope buried somewhere in these songs. Even if it feels out of reach, Carve makes the case that it’s worth straining toward whatever might keep the darkness at bay.
