This week’s indie folk trades polish for intimacy. Bedroom tape hiss, quiet defiance, a bit of playful myth and some hard-won warmth: songs recorded close to the bone, where the smallest gestures carry the most weight and honesty does the heavy lifting.
Esteban Obando – Montreal (Feeling it All)
“Montreal (Feeling it All)” is a stunning lo-fi folk gem from Esteban Obando, a single-take confession that turns tape hiss into pure feeling.
This is a song that treats its own imperfections as instruments. Cut in one afternoon straight to cassette, it wraps double-tracked vocals in a bath of spring reverb, a faint drum-machine ticking away beneath like a pulse you half-notice. Nothing here is corrected or tidied, and that’s precisely why it lands: the wobble and warmth of the tape carry as much emotion as the melody does. It’s a lovely atmosphere, a little hazy at the edges, aching in the middle, and all together gone too soon.
Esteban Obando is a Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist with Colombian roots and a Montreal upbringing, who writes, plays, records and produces alone. He tracks everything on a 1990s Tascam Portastudio 424, the same four-track deck Elliott Smith used for Roman Candle, deliberately leaning on its limits to keep his own perfectionism in check. I started recording on a Tascam, but I never managed to get it to sound this amazing. A brilliant single, and I’ll definitely be digging into Esteban’s other work. Beautiful stuff.
Nellie Feldmann – Turn Down My Shine
“Turn Down My Shine” is a brilliant piece of bedroom-pop folk from Nellie Feldmann, a song that proves a whisper can cut deeper than a shout.
Nellie Feldmann’s new single is a takedown delivered barely above a breath. Close-mic’d vocals and spare acoustic instrumentation sit in a soft, tape-warm glow, and the restraint is the vibe here: instead of raising its voice at the narcissist it addresses, the song lowers it, forcing you to lean in. This could have been a rant, but it turns into something far more unsettling and precise. The chorus here is genuinely brilliant, and it’s a gentle surface with a very sharp edge underneath.
Nellie Feldmann is a Brighton-based singer-songwriter and session musician whose work sits where acoustic indie meets the intimate textures of Generation X-inspired bedroom pop. She wrote “Turn Down My Shine” with Tim Howarth, who also produced and mixed it, chasing a delicate, organic sound that keeps the songwriting front and centre. Guided by an intense musical sensitivity, she moves between introspective melody and raw feeling, landing on something that reads as both nostalgic and unmistakably present-day. It’s a banger this one, make no mistake of it.