The Los Angeles project of Jack Dione and Silas Johnson, Angel Investor, is a gesture where inertia meets a wounded grace. Their debut album, I Can’t Smell the Roses Underground via Jane Records, doesn’t attempt to tidy up the emotional debris of youth—it lets it pile up, collapse, and settle.

Formed in 2022, Angel Investor isn’t necessarily a side project to Jack’s untitled (halo) or Silas’ tracy, but a precursor. And moreover, a way to remember a time. Fully recorded in Silas’ bedroom over the course of 3 years, the album is a diaristic plea to archive, no matter how fragile the feeling and even when our memory warps truth. You can hear it in the way a melody repeats like a mantra, or how a vocal take is left untouched, sometimes malapropic, but alive. 

In their lead single, “stillicide,” whirring strings stretch and blur, the rhythmic patterns fraying so that silence is allowed to hang like a suspended breath. The result is a quiet devastation, one that's more overheard than performed. Jack sings, “This endless ennui makes me want to die.” It’s a coming-of-age notion that never fully announces itself, but lingers in the margins like a memory you can’t quite place. This persistent need we feel when we are young can be tender, uncertain, and often aching—but it’s not without light. Maybe this wanting can also be interpreted as an undying hope, and maybe I Can’t Smell the Roses Underground isn't as much about the triumph of youth, as it is the long drift before anything comes at all.  

Jack shares, “ICSTRU has been through so many iterations, it's insane that it's even coming out… ‘Moth’ and ‘Pale Blue Heart’ were actually the first two songs we ever made together in the first session we ever had, so seeing them released finally is kind of emotional. Especially contextualized next to all these other songs we've made over the last three years. So many eras of our emotions documented in the exact same room over such a formative period time makes this album feel like a ghost story.” 

Trapped in the same four walls where they were born in, the reverberations become shaped by the scuffs on the floorboards and the low hum of passing time. The bedroom is a site not for comfort, but a container for clutter to resurface and unravel. Described as “a chance for truths to be explored,” Silas says I Can’t Smell the Roses Underground is a place where “love is thrown at a focusrite 4i4 until it’s reduced to its concentrated necessities.”

If people can be broken down into memories, perhaps love can be weathered down to those quiet moments. 

And moments, like ghosts, tend to linger. 

Even after it’s gone.