Shaylee - Short-Sighted Security (2022) [Hi-Res]

As Shaylee, Portland, Oregon’s Elle Archer creates lush, densely packed worlds of chamber rock. Her upcoming record, Short-Sighted Security, is an uncompromising, dark, and paranoid meditation on mid-twenties growing pains and the nagging feeling of knowing you need to change, but not knowing the right way forward.

 The interplay between silence and noise is tonally massive - and Elle uses this to her advantage to create an experience defined by polarity; capturing wide-eyed highs just as vividly as she does strung-out comedowns, often in the same song.

“It’s a personal album, for sure,” says Elle, who wrote and recorded the album almost entirely alone during quarantine in 2020. “I had nothing but time to dedicate to writing and recording, so I gave this record everything I had. I was spiraling out of control in my personal life, and yet the music kept getting bigger, and more grandiose, and I just kept pouring more and more into it until it became this behemoth and a huge source of release for me. It was keeping me going by means of sheer ambition for its own sake." This level of precision and dedication to craft is clear from the album's outset, and it makes to create an altogether unique entity and a disarmingly confident label debut.