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What a skill it is to render the delicate weave of a frayed ribbon’s edge or the constellation of freckles on the skin of a pear onto a blank paper. Isn’t that what art is so often thought to be: imitating life to an almost impossible degree? And yet, within the vastness of such accuracy, perhaps the truest part of a subject begins to fade beneath the minute, hidden behind the grandeur of the skill itself. But what if the greater challenge is not in confessing it all, but in saying just enough—to create meaning through the smallest gestures, with restraint and breath. In this way, a single circle might become the sun or the moon, a clock or a coin, an emblem of wholeness or the outline of absence. Perhaps beauty lives not in the perfection of detail, but in the tension between what remains unspoken and what we allow to fill in.

It is in this parley that Skullcrusher’s sophomore album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, from her new label home Dirty Hit, takes hold. NY-based Helen Ballentine finds herself following the curved line that leads her back to where she started. But this time, she arrives carrying the quiet weight of experience–the clarity and ache that comes from truly having been away and then finding her way home. 

Following her 2021 debut, Quiet the Room—an album where Ballentine lingered in the imaginative spaces of childhood and memory, crafting vivid worlds that seemed to unfold right before you—And Your Song is Like a Circle turns toward the incorporeal. Here, she leans into what is vast and abstract: not a place, but a notion of return. The album circles something that can’t quite be held. Here she favors air and restraint, dry, minimal, and room-forward, creating a hybrid of folk instrumentation and ambient textural sensibility. There’s a quiet, tremulous intimacy to her songs—an almost weightless quality—yet beneath the softness lies a kind of emotional granularity that feels deeply lived-in. Her arrangements, often built from gossamer guitar lines and vapor-thin vocal layers, are seemingly less composed than exhaled.

And Your Song is Like a Circle opens, true to Skullcrusher form, with a question: “What am I living for?” on the first track, “March.” Ballentine has long been drawn to asking questions for them only to be left unanswered; her earlier works, like the Skullcrusher EP and Storm in Summer, traced the fringe of the ungraspable, circling what can never be fully captured. But, how do we start to ask why time must pass and why we feel its movement so acutely? Here, she doesn’t try to answer so much as dwell—softly, deliberately—in the spaces those questions create. The songs move like light refracted through glass, returning again and again to themes of impermanence, repetition, and the quiet ache of wanting to understand the shape of one’s own life. It’s an album that suggests that the asking itself is the closest we may ever get to truth, and that there’s a strange and tender beauty in that perpetual reaching.

But answers come in many forms. In “Maelstrom,” Ballentine reaches toward one of the more turbulent ones—a recognition that understanding isn’t always serene, and that clarity can arrive hand-in-hand with unease. The song feels like standing inside a weather pattern that refuses to settle, its soft pulses and wavering harmonies mirroring the mind’s own circular, restless attempts to grasp what it means to be moved by time rather than move through it. Ballentine doesn’t shy away from that helplessness; the track becomes a portrait of the very human urge to press pause on the accelerating blur, to ask it to slow its turning just long enough to understand what’s being lost and what’s being formed in its place. Yet even in its tension, “Maelstrom” carries a glint of gentleness—a subtle suggestion that surrender is not the same as defeat, and that even the most disorienting currents can pull us toward a quiet kind of grace.

“Over many years, you're going to have a different feeling and just accepting that knowing the moment you're having will change, and you can still hold that in your mind. I would say oscillating between feeling overwhelmed by time and change, but also coming to a place of acceptance… not clinging too much, letting things move forward,” she explains. “‘Maelstrom’ is more anxious about it, caught in that cycle and the feeling of overwhelm that you can get when you're aware of how you have no control over things changing and continuing.”

If “Maelstrom” is a storm, then the path through the album is “Dragon,” a meditation on why we must endure life in order to truly live. From the very first notes, Skullcrusher’s sound feels like a study in minimal abundance with sparse arrangements that somehow feel expansive, quietness that echoes, and simplicity that reveals complexity only after you settle into it. The music asks for patience and in return, it offers a subtle, transformative depth. Take “Exhale,” for example where even the smallest shift—a breath, a vowel, the way a note catches—can reframe the entire emotional landscape of a song.

“Nothing is completely set in stone or that, you know, there's all of these little changes and nuances here that make it so that what I'm saying doesn't feel too permanent. Maybe there's a little bit more ephemerality in showing that there's not actually a correct lyric here, or there's not a correct way to sing it,” she explains. “I'm always reminding people of that, especially when arranging a song live for my songs. I don't feel like there's one way to perform it. It’s an awareness of things changing over time or being different in one moment. I loved utilizing my voice to do that because the voice is spontaneous and natural, something everybody has and can use as a way of expressing emotion. There's such a range of ways you can use your voice to communicate, outside of just language.” It’s an approach that makes every rendition feel like a small act of renewal—an exhale, a living thing always in the midst of becoming.

And even deeper uncertainties hum beneath the album. Yet, Ballentine speaks with a kind of quiet clarity—less searching for a solution than acknowledging the impossibility of having one. “I think there’s a searching to accept that there are always things you can’t control in life, whether it’s time passing or people changing, and, you know, so many things that we can’t control. But I think there is a feeling of getting close to understanding things, but knowing you have to believe before you can fully understand. You can’t get to the bottom of everything in a logical sense, so there’s always a little bit of a hidden area. You have to trust that that’s okay.” She offers, “Accepting that concept relates to spirituality, belief, and maybe some kind of God. You have to suspend yourself a little bit and accept that you’re not gonna find the answer.” In her music, that suspension becomes a kind of gentle surrender—an openness to mystery rather than a fear of it.

For Ballentine, creation is less an act of mastery than one of yielding. What emerges in the studio is simply what she has the capacity to hold at that moment. Perhaps, it is more about discovering what wants to exist rather than what she expects it to be. She explains, “Songwriting is a way for me to practice letting go. I don't always know if I'm doing it perfectly or like, maybe it's not always feeling comfortable, but I think that I'm always trying to accept what I've made and let it be what it is… whatever I'm making now is what I'm supposed to be making, what I'm capable of in this moment, and I can't force it to be something that it's not. So just having acceptance for that, I think I try to do that in my process of recording.” It’s a philosophy that threads through the album: creation not as control, but as a quiet agreement with the present.

Ballentine circles back to the album’s central image—its quiet insistence that shape and meaning aren’t always the same, and that the boundary between them can be the most evocative part. “I feel like the circle is like a line, but the center, which was previously a blank page, is now full of something. And I think that idea of this designation, this line, creating something that could also be seen as nothing, is really beautiful, especially when applied to these concepts of these big concepts in life, where sometimes it's the outline or just the idea of it that forms it into what it is in a way that defies definition or tangible experience. It's the container for something being different from the thing itself, which also relates to any sort of symbol or sign or language itself… like how the word car is different from a car.” In that distinction—between the thing and the space that holds it—Ballentine finds a world of possibility, a reminder that meaning often lives at the edge.

The circle, as she draws it, becomes both a boundary and a homecoming: a way of naming the fact that we revisit the same questions with new eyes each time. The circle becomes the perfect metaphor: a shape that repeats, but never quite in the same way, allowing space at its center for new understanding to form. In this way, the And Your Song is Like a Circle returns us to the premise that opened it: that beauty isn’t in replicating the world down to its last frayed edge, but in trusting what emerges when we leave room for the unsaid. Here, we come back to where we began—but the center is no longer blank.