U.e.

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

Some albums surface like faded photographs forgotten in an attic—and Hometown Girl is one of them. The title evokes the return of a young woman to the place where it all began; she opens the front door, climbs slowly up to the attic, and rediscovers old family tapes. These aren’t finished tracks, but sonic sketches, scattered snapshots, seemingly disconnected yet brimming with tenderness and depth.

U.e. is the alias of Ulla E. Straus, an American artist with an already solid trajectory. Since her early steps in the 2010s, her music has whispered fragility with grace, reaching full expressive maturity in works like Big Room and Tumbling Towards A Wall, where ambient-dub and glitch-music blended into intimate storytelling. In this latest release, the soundscape becomes more tactile, almost ambient-pop: guitars, pianos (distorted and grainy, as if William Basinski momentarily let go of his drones), winds and percussion treated with the care of someone walking along the edge of a memory.

If there’s one feeling this record evokes, it’s that of a winter morning (Good Morning). But also the stillness of a slow afternoon, the muffled noises of a sleeping house, the distant whispers of a tired gramophone, the slow breath of chamber jazz (Lavender (NF)). It’s an ambient-emo haze that doesn’t demand your attention, but gently earns it, with a peacefulness that often fades into soft nostalgia. The glitches don’t break the silence—they fill it; they settle on a bed of forgotten music boxes (Ball). The guitars feel like they’re coming from the next room, recorded from afar, like memories finally making themselves heard (Gecko). Everything vibrates with a veiled, fragile, transparent lightness. These sonic textures, shaped by an elegant electroacoustic command, take form as dusty collages; like a Khonnor 2.0, glimpses open up like bittersweet memories—perhaps idealized, stripped of the wounds they once carried, leaving us only the aftertaste of a happiness we failed to recognize.

Hometown Girl is not an album to be listened to: it’s a place to be wandered through in silence. It’s a shy caress, lost among acoustic instruments and synthetic details: suspended clarinets, brushes on sleepless jazz drums (Drawing Of Me), and digital manipulations. It’s the ethereal sound of an empty home—the sound of rooms where people lived and suffered in silence. But it’s also the quiet company of a friend, a record that stays with you on the dullest nights and in the brightest mornings. In the end, what lingers is the impression of an embrace: warm, hesitant, like someone who remains in the shadows but opens up with you like a letter never sent, with no need for too many words.

30/04/2025