Back in late May, Salt Lake City songwriter Josaleigh Pollett posted about how excited they were for their best friend and long-time collaborator Jordan Watko to visit and spend the summer playing music with them. Friends visiting from long distances is always nice. But when friends travel almost 8,000 miles, it’s even more amazing. And when those friends travel that far to help make some sweet art, the feeling is indescribable.
But what’s more impressive than that is not letting distance get in the way of art, especially when that art — created over the course of a year and across a whole ocean — can still feel like something made in close quarters.
And so we have Pollett’s fourth full-length album, If I Let It Quiet, out via our good friends at Audio Antihero. It’s the third collaboration between Pollett and Watko, with both beginning work on it in late 2023. And while Watko was still SLC-based at the time, he would move to Osaka, Japan in early 2024, right as inspiration for the new album was starting to pick up. The shift took an emotional toll on Pollett, but it didn’t put a dent in their relationship with Watko. It meant taking a small step back from the music, instead focusing on regular FaceTime conversations and keeping their connection strong overseas.
From there sprang a new way of working together, despite time zones. It meant bringing in new collaborators like Nashville-based multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Andrew Goldring, who added deeper levels of sound to the new album. It meant finding methods for remote recording, even though Pollett would be recording takes in the evening while Watko was rolling out of bed in the morning. It meant finding ways to close the space between the miles that separated them while still leaving enough of a crack for their sound to bloom.
And does If I Let It Quiet bloom, with its leaves and flowers and fruits of sound sprawling every which way in the garden of your ears. Pollett once again shirks getting locked down to any one genre, blending indie, electronica, experimentalism, folk, and field recordings in ways that reinvent their sound from track to track. Some songs creak quietly like floorboards under hushed footsteps. Others burst like windows exploding in a house on fire. And of course, some do both.
Maybe due to the distance, Pollett and Watko chose to fill the songs on the new album with as much ambition and exploration as possible. The jumble of sounds that open the record on “Shed Piano, Birds” hint at the overall product’s direction: Naturally blossoming, pulling inspiration from everywhere. Voices of friends overlap piano notes and electronic sketches for two minutes, creating a soundscape that welcomes the listener into the space Pollett and Watko create between them.
Then “Cherry” features Pollett’s signature poetry — “The blood’s not blood, it’s the juice from a cherry” — sung through their melodic voice that for the uninitiated hits somewhere between St. Vincent, Phoebe Bridgers, and Florence Welch. As its slower, pensive rhythm fades into a high electronic hum, a raw-sounding recording of Pollett singing and playing the song on piano begins, showcasing the working sessions that led to the creation of If I Let It Quiet. It’s a gorgeous addition, as well as a theme throughout the record.
“The Witness” — which we featured not too long ago — bursts forth with a scattering of electric noise before launching into an indie jam with overtones of ethereal pads, where the passionate lyrics match the intensity of the music. Pollett says that the song is about “knowing that to be seen and held and understood, you must first see and hold and understand. It’s about love, beyond limits and gender, across multiple universes.” A featured lyric that tore at my heartstrings as it might tear at yours: “I’ll tell you my name when it’s in a new language / Will you tell me I’m your favorite version of me, and then watch while I change it?”
(Pollett also says about “The Witness”: “It’s also a little bit about deleting my Twitter account.” You should follow them on Bluesky.)
Among the songs that mesh styles: “Bed of Quiet” blends hushed pads and Pollett’s almost hushed voice with synth pops and a bursting drum beat that beckons the other parts of the song to raise their volume and fill the void, right up to the end where the song is anything but quiet. “Like A River” has a beat which sounds like recordings of body percussion mixed with processed voice clips and fed through a step sequencer. It gives an electronic backbeat to Pollett’s voice and raw guitar, especially as they repeat “I think I’m gonna be up for a while” with the sonic chaos growing around them. The track also bears the album title in its lyrics: “If I let it quiet, who am I if not my thinking?”
The album name, If I Let It Quiet, comes from the constant need to fill space, not to let too much distance form between people or ideas or one’s understanding of themselves. On every track on the album, Pollett and Watko bounce off each other, with Pollett putting everything they have into their lyrics and melodies and Watko (and Goldring) surrounding them with sounds that make the songs overflow from speakers and headphones and bleed into the listener’s heart. Even when tracks on the album get a bit sparse in their instrumentation — as on “Second Guesser”, which features little more than Pollett’s voice, the guitar, some pads, and a cello courtesy of friend Hal Jean — it fades into the glitch symphony of “Escape Routes”, a fast-paced four minutes of immaculate “crying-at-the-club” vibes where Pollett proclaims “When you take out your escape routes, you must fight.”
(Another banger lyric from “Escape Routes”: “My hand in the making of what is gonna hurt me, hurt me / And I’d rather start over than lose all control”. Gut punch.)
“Radio Player” — the track that began the work on the record, born before Watko went abroad — hints at Poltergeist or Videodrome, with Pollett evoking images of ghosts coming from the TV. As with most of the music on If I Let It Quiet, the song deals with distance, but on a larger — even dimensional — scale. It seems fitting that this was the song that spawned the record, as the real physical distance between them formed after its conception, and now both Pollett and Watko are reaching out through screens to each other. Lyric of note from this track: “The house isn’t there anymore, and I don’t know if it ever was / But memory is a fickle thing when you cope with the damage like us.”
The album closes with “We All Got It Right”, which is perhaps the least electronic-inspired track on the record, but it makes up the sound in roaring electric guitars and thundering drums during the choruses. It blends into the instrumental “Yasuka, Natsu”, a mix of ambient piano, glitch sounds, guitars, and other sounds floating in the liminal space between friends. Then the final track “Tacit” — for “quiet” — cuts in with finger-picked acoustic guitar and Pollett’s vocals, giving two minutes of relative calm before it too explodes into a rush of beautiful noise to close up the distance between the beginning of the record and the end. The song almost mourns the growing distance not just between points in space, but points in time: “Is it slipping? What comes next? Just living to change it back.”
And that seems to explain the whole record: Pollett says that If I Let It Quiet is about “what it takes to quiet the noise of geographical and emotional distance in order to hear ourselves and the ones
who see us.” But when we hear ourselves, the voice changes over time, and it seems like we have to listen even harder to hear the version of ourselves that existed in a different place or mindset. So sometimes it’s not about quieting the noise, but about filling the void, or finding new ways to work or live, in order to survive.
Pollett and Watko weren’t going to let thousands of miles separate them from working together or keep them from staying friends. If I Let It Quiet is the result: Pollett’s passionate songwriting and musicality and Watko’s production coming together over time and space to show that nothing can break a strong enough connection: Neither the ones we have with others, nor the ones we have with ourselves.
As mentioned, Watko’s coming back to the States to perform with Pollett on a month-long tour across the West. If you happen to be nearby during the dates listed below, definitely catch them if you can. Otherwise, take a listen to “Like a River” below and turn your volume up very loud to simulate the effect of seeing them live.
Written by Will Sisskind
