FORAGER - Even A Child Can Cover the Sun With A Finger

There are albums that are magnetic. One note, and they've already captivated you. A single bar goes by, and it's already impossible to look away. Of course, you need the right opening track. But for the spell to hold across the whole record, that alone isn't enough.

Sometimes it's a matter of hitting on the right sound: once you've hooked the listener's mood, given the right emotional conditions, the alchemy is more or less guaranteed to last. But what if the sound and the sensations keep changing? That's where you really need class. And class is the best word to describe the music of Forager, an American band with just one album to their name before this disarming "Even A Child Can Cover the Sun With A Finger", out in February on Ring Road, a sublabel of Brooklyn's La Reserve.

The initial miracle is worked by "Your Good Time", with its pulsing, nocturnal synth, a sumptuous carpet laid out for the voice of Shyamala Ramakrishna, a 27-year-old of Tamil descent whose expressive versatility can carry her from Aurora to Haim within the space of half a verse. Her center of gravity, though, sits on coordinates closer to jazz and r'n'b, and it's on the more bluesy inflections, complete with microtonal bends, that her expressive palette becomes most nuanced.

The rest is a constant shift in perspective: a kaleidoscopic, refined sound, with a retro grace that counterbalances indie-prog-pop swerves in the style of Magdalena Bay and pinpoint grooves somewhere between wonky and broken beat. A dazzling combination of sophisticated harmonies, timbres that rarely take the obvious route, and melodies that, in their peculiar obliqueness, lodge themselves in your head for days.

"Double Dutch" moves with a dreamy, muffled feel, between crystalline, echoing guitars and plays of fullness and emptiness, with taps on harmonics and gated drums lifted straight from "Hounds Of Love". "Haiku Nursery Rhyme", right after, is already at the opposite end of the spectrum: whimsical and darting, vaguely Stereolab-like in its dazed playfulness.

A rhythmic liquefaction opens the knockout track, "Pomeranian", built on a funky and somewhat wave-inflected verse that leads into the chorus's about-face — a sharp stop that slots in a chromatic rise-and-fall as surprising as it is contagious. Just as contagious — here and elsewhere — is the lyric, witty and cutting, which compares its addressee to a spitz dog and mocks the gentrification of behavior even before that of places:

You’ve got the right touch of vintage

A layer of grit

But I kinda think that you’re full of shit

A touch of vintage and nothing to say

A pomeranian getting its way

So far we've mostly talked about Ramakrishna, but none of it would work without the precision and inventiveness of guitarist/bassist/keyboardist Jack Broza and drummer Colum Enrique, who move effortlessly between different registers and blend them seamlessly even within the same song.

"Autobody" surprises with a trip-hop-leaning folk in the style of Beth Orton; "Split Lip", caught between shadowy alt-rock and dream-pop lights, rediscovers the power of a good riff — and the value of letting it evolve. Sparkling and just the right amount of videogame-like, "Grown Up" slides verse by verse from electronics to rock with a slightly grunge flavor, before spilling into a sunny, late-Nineties pop chorus (yes, basically we're in Garbage territory here!).

It's hard to sketch the ideal listener for such an eclectic record: the best thing to do is give it a chance and see whether the magic takes hold. What's certain is that anyone who in recent years has been into the most crooked, off-kilter jazz-pop, from Knower to Hiatus Kaiyote, will find fresh food for thought here.

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11/05/2026