Elanor Moss

Elanor Moss announces her debut album “The Knife, The Needle,” out August 21st on Merge Records, and shares the single and video “Sarah Waiting in the Car.” Across nine songs, Moss renders joy and pain in exquisite peals of psych-folk, her darkly-dreamed vignettes offering an understanding of healing as a process, rather than an object one obtains. This album is sure to be on many End-of-year lists.

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The first song written for The Knife, The Needle , “Sarah Waiting in the Car,” sets the tone for the album, Moss’ delicate, contemplative guitar playing and the brushstrokes of Matthew Herd’s arrangement of an ensemble — Marcus Hamblett (horn), Jool Owen (horn), Andrew Stuart-Buttle (violin), Reid Jenkins (violin), Linus Fenton (double bass), and Herd (saxophone) — embellishing her intricately detailed lyrics with heart-rending gravitas as the song’s narrative turns, deftly, from a meeting at the bar to the aftermath of an abusive relationship, gentleness turning into violence.

“‘Sarah Waiting in the Car’ broke an almost year-long drought of writing songs,” says Moss. “It reignited that spark in me around songwriting, and felt like a breakthrough into something new and intriguing that I wanted to follow. It served as a bit of a guiding light as I re-entered a more consistent relationship with songwriting again; the north star of the album in a way.”