That surrender came during a moment she recalls as “fraught with self-doubt.” For years, Ballentine had been dealing with panic attacks and severe anxiety, but she only recently chose to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed her with an anti-anxiety medication and a dosage of klonopin. “For the first six months […] I was still in LA and my life was sort of stable,” says Ballentine. “When things became unstable, that’s when I started to use my klonopin more.” Her cross-country move, recent breakup, and the sudden illness of her cat, Finn, all culminated in a precarious period of addiction. “I remember not knowing what to do in that situation because I really wanted to call my partner at the time and then I couldn’t,” Ballentine recalls. “I didn’t have anybody [at home] besides my mom, which I’m very grateful for, but it was hard because I didn’t have my life, my friends, and I didn’t know if Finn was going to die.” It took Ballentine another year to find a new doctor whom she could be open about her addiction. “I was trying really hard to get off it on my own, but I would later realize that wasn’t going to happen. I had to try before I really was able to say, ‘I need to do this with help.’”
Last November, she entered a program with a week of detox and four weeks of rehabilitation. “Somehow the record was made during all of that,” says Ballentine. “By the time I went to rehab, we were basically done with the record.” Despite the impact that rehab had on her life, the record isn’t about Ballentine’s struggle with addiction. “The whole recovery process happened afterwards,” she says. Looking back on the songs after this experience, “I can catch this glimmer of hope and strength in them, even when at the time that I was writing them I was feeling so uncertain.” She credits the writing process with this glimpse of perspective. When she listens to the songs now, “I can feel reassured that they’re something I can always have to remember the headspace I was in.”
Exploring these deeper thematic spaces made this record more sonically expansive, illuminating new facets of the Skullcrusher sound. Ballentine has been lauded for the hushed, haunting melodies of Quiet the Room and earlier works like 2021’s Storm in Summer EP. While these qualities are certainly present on And Your Song is Like a Circle, Ballentine has evolved the elements of her production, notably with the use of percussion, which is more present than it’s ever been in her discography. Ballentine credits Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out and Cat Power’s Moon Pix for the album’s use of minimalist drum sounds. The beats of songs like “Dragon” and “Periphery” have a broad, hollow quality that supports the airiness of the vocal and string arrangements.
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Ballentine attributes the growth of her sound to her collaboration with producer and former Strange Ranger co-bandleader Isaac Eiger, whose dynamic shapes many of the album’s sonic qualities. Eiger was attuned to Ballentine’s spontaneous writing practice, and in turn, their creative decisions were the product of a musical mind meld. “We weren’t overworking at all,” she says. “A lot of the songs were basically produced in one day.” The two share a catalog of musical inspirations that informed the record, namely the ambient, explosive songs of Julianna Barwick and the reticent melodies of Grouper. The record often cedes to the bounds of its spaces, letting the sparse lyrics of songs like “The Emptying” swell with meaning even without ample description. Ballentine is careful not to overwrite, choosing to emulate sounds and feelings that she finds universal. In turn, Ballentine has aimed to emulate the voice’s most basic uses, letting her vocal performance sound like a sigh, a cry, or even a breath on the song “Exhale.”
Ballentine’s dynamic relationship with space and location also crept into the sound of the album, particularly in the production choices of songs like “Periphery,” which recounts a dream she had. This song is addressed to the shadowed figure of Ballentine’s subconscious, to whom she asks, “Will I ever see you this way again? / Out of the corner of my eye singing.” In the dream, Ballentine was playing a show with one of the original iterations of the Skullcrusher band, which included her former partner. The song mourns the loss of that relationship, and more broadly, people who are no longer around, as well as “how you still have these interactions with them, but it’s with their memory.” Ballentine wanted the song to mirror that recollection, when “everything was just falling apart.” By the time the subject leaves her field of vision, the foundation of the song caves in on itself—the percussion slowly fades out and disappears, and the melody completely goes underwater. “I wanted that swallowed feeling,” says Ballentine. It’s a feat of production I’ve never heard in a song before, and it’s pristinely executed.
Ballentine has a knack for creating sonic environments that feel like visual experiences, often the result of her attempts to capture memory through sound. She internalized the visual language of the films she was watching throughout the writing process. “When I’m struggling, films and books are places that I really gravitate towards. They become just as real to me as my experience in the physical world.” Ballentine lists the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and the late David Lynch as two pillars of her cinematic experiences—two seemingly discordant directors that oddly coalesce in the Skullcrusher universe. Lynch’s films often linger on the dark underbellies of familiar settings—take the dank suburbia of Twin Peaks or overwrought LA of Mulholland Drive—and they often descend into terror in the midst of this familiarity. Ballentine’s music shares this dichotomy, picking apart bleak environments and searching for light within the darkness.
The settings of Skullcrusher are skilled at illuminating familiar spaces—the ways they can soothe and unnerve in the same breath. The start of “Red Car” finds Ballentine sitting in her car, “the red one/that would break down somewhere in New Jersey,” and descends into a labyrinthine perspective: “And I think of / All of the parking lots/and the parking spaces / Form a constellation / Of all the places I hated and I loved.” While writing “Red Car,” “I was really interested in this idea that my body was still kind of a ghost in my home in LA, because I hadn’t been able to move forward from it,” Ballentine explains.
Oftentimes, Ballentine relies on the theoretical to parse through conflicting feelings—take the song, “Maelstrom,” which represents a tough clash of emotions as the imagined gyre of the song’s title. The song was written after a falling out with a friend, an experience she has deemed “even more difficult than a romantic breakup.” While reeling from the pain of this loss, she felt the weight of the hurt she’d caused. “It really felt at that point that I was caught in some kind of vortex, and the force of it was too great for me to change,” says Ballentine. She indulged her instinct to catastrophize her feelings: “Born from a death / Born from the lack of love / The lacking of a family,” she sings in the first verse. “I allowed myself to fall into some of those more negative thought patterns of, ‘Is this all predetermined? Because of the circumstances of my family and what I was born into, do I have certain behavioral patterns that I can’t ever overcome?’” She doesn’t see these questions as viable outside of a songwriting context, but points to the cognitive dissonance between the reality of a situation and the pain it inflicts. “My pain seemed so much more powerful than how I would describe the situation,” Ballentine remarks. But the pathos of “Maelstrom” feels earned. “With problems in your life, explaining it to yourself or explaining it logically or can sometimes just feel insufficient.”
“Over the course of writing this record, I was constantly engaging with circular ideas and images,” Ballentine continues. “In ‘Maelstrom,’ the circular concept is more constraining and claustrophobic.” Naturally, these images fit the context of each song, as the rigidity of a vicious cycle can just as easily morph into a feedback loop, capturing hope and letting it reverberate. Ballentine remembers the moment she began engaging with circular motifs. She attended a Mount Eerie concert during a period of dissociation and felt an overwhelming sense of being back in her body. “I felt a moment of hopefulness, and it just came through as a circle to me. I was very much thinking of that as a guiding force, like my intuition or something.” These circular impressions were both visual and extraterrestrial, guiding Ballentine through the process of making music in a place of instability. “That’s the nature of being in a period of heavy, overwhelming change, when you’re very aware that you’re in some kind of cycle or some kind of transition—it was kind of colored with everything circular.”
The album’s title is pulled from a line of “Exhale,” where Ballentine sings, “I saw you were singing / With your eyes closed / And your song is like a circle.” “Exhale” is as much of a relief as the title suggests, with its circular imagery contextualizing pain as temporal, as part of the larger cycle of life. After writing the album, Ballentine felt “more in touch with the idea of a circle feeling infinite.” The process of penning the album was a much-needed juncture to recalibrate, a chance to think of circularity as a freeing concept. Ballentine returns to the meta-textual acknowledgment of her own music within her lyrics: “Like an exhale it will come / If this song is like breathing / I feel it leave / I feel it in me,” she sings. For every pillar of eternality that strains, for every vortex and violent maelstrom, there’s a stronger pull towards the eye of a hurricane. In all the forms it’s taken, Helen Ballentine holds circularity close to her chest.
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