You could count the number of intelligible words across IOWA on your fingers if you wanted to. One of them is “January,” and another one is “snowstorm.” The new album from the Brooklyn-based artist Lia Ouyang Rusli, who records as OHYUNG, is both flush with the timbre of the human voice and almost completely empty of language. As OHYUNG’s first ambient album since 2022’s imagine naked!, IOWA joins a growing body of recent work—by more eaze, Lucy Liyou, even Ethel Cain on her more experimental ventures—that positions the voice not as an authoritative anchor at the center of a composition, but as a stray vapor trail daring listeners to draw meaning from its wisps.
Rusli, who lived in Iowa City from 2023 to 2024, wrote IOWA as an homage, or response, to Bruce Springsteen’s pivotal 1982 album Nebraska. The two records share a naming convention, a cover design, and an abundance of negative space: Springsteen’s sparse, tape-recorded LP let the flesh drop off his songs until they stood, skeletal, against an unbound and desolate landscape. Both records cast bleary eyes upon the American Midwest, but what a gesture it is to iterate upon Springsteen, a songwriter steeped waist-deep in poetry, with an album that declines to string more than a fistful of words together. If Nebraska hinged on its narratives, which were so rich and powerfully articulated that they inspired a book of short fiction, IOWA wades into the atmosphere left behind when all the ambivalent protagonists have been cleared from the stage. This chilling, starkly beautiful ambient piece draws Nebraska’s marginal whispers to the forefront and smears them across the picture plane.
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OHYUNG’s most recent album, 2025’s You Are Always on My Mind, was nimble, direct, and genre-voracious, bridging alternative pop with uptempo (if askew) dance numbers. By contrast, IOWA is as glacial and unyielding as a long drive across the Great Plains. Many of its songs crystallize around samples of choirs singing, their soft syllables dissolving beneath heavy shrouds of reverb. Even severed from their context and mutated beyond recognition, these samples carry the gravity of sacred space, as if they were still reverberating beneath the impossibly high ceilings of the cathedrals in which they might have originally been sung.
The seriousness of these voices, and the traditions they embody, imbues IOWA with both a delicate beauty and a sense of dislocated menace. On “the black angel,” choral loops overlap and cascade in the background, some pitch-shifted to inhuman lows, while a pair of footsteps shuffles at the top of the mix. Somewhere behind thick walls, crowds congregate; right here, someone else walks alone. Synth washes mimic the liturgical timbre of the voices on “christofascism,” and then a great percussive crash punctuates their garbled phonemes, as if an urgent command has been imparted but could not possibly be understood.
