Fiver

One of our most compelling and thoughtful narrative voices, Simone Schmidt's dark-hued solo debut delves dark and deep into death, loss and how we manage to live with it all. Schmidt has spent her public life exploring her personal principles, as they relate to the industry of popular music. In One Hundred Dollars, this negotiation was more evident; she took on gender, class and racial politics as a robust searcher and applied them to country music, demonstrating that it's obviously not only love that can break your heart. The minimal, psych-rock songs of Fiver, which are closely aligned with her recent work in the Highest Order, are notably denser because the subject matter, while universal, is super-specific to Schmidt's vocational circumstances. She has nursed friends through cancer treatments and worked closely with disabled patients; in giving so much to those in poor health, she nearly lost sight of herself. This is Schmidt emerging from a surreal haze, dizzily engaged in a stoic investigation about the working life and what keeps her tense world spinning.