Warm Currency - Petals (2024) [Hi-Res]

Warm Currency—the duo of Australian artists/musicians MP Hopkins and Mary MacDougall—return for their third release on Horn Of Plenty, following up Returns (2022) and Live at the Petersham Bowling Club (2023). On Petals, the pair’s haunting folk music comes into sharper focus while broadening their sonic palette. Spoken word meets chanted incantations, gently fingerpicked acoustic guitar is placed alongside spindly piano melodies, the creak of floorboards in the background mirrors the creak of fingerprints dragged across guitar strings. Woven throughout are bursts of tape-recorded radio static that reveal hardly distinguishable voices while MacDougall sings of equally fleeting phenomena. Winds, breezes, and mists rattle through houses and crumbling cityscapes throughout, with objects in a constant state of flux: growing, burning, drying, rotting, or unfurling. Such cryptic suggestions and surreal imagery evade easy parsing but like a poignant dream linger with the listener.

Mary MacDougall: piano, keyboards, vocals
MP Hopkins: guitars, stringed instruments.

Tracklist:
1-1. Warm Currency - The First Flower (03:37)
1-2. Warm Currency - Her House (03:14)
1-3. Warm Currency - Weeds (01:26)
1-4. Warm Currency - Mirror Market (04:14)
1-5. Warm Currency - First Cup (02:10)
1-6. Warm Currency - Clay Graffiti (03:57)
1-7. Warm Currency - Yellow Rose (05:23)
1-8. Warm Currency - Shell Space (03:06)
1-9. Warm Currency - Second Cup (02:18)
1-10. Warm Currency - Yellow Rose (Reprise) (01:36)
1-11. Warm Currency - Ring of Fish (05:15)
1-12. Warm Currency - Reading Rocks (03:28)