Helen

Liz Harris is often dubbed a phantom, an enigma, or even a ghost, the reputation rising from the murky but beautiful drift of the records she makes as Grouper. But for all the talk of her time in shadow, Harris is a committed and open collaborator, from her work with the great collective Badgerlore to her absorbing partnership with Jefre Cantu-Ledesma as Raum. In 2015, following a single years earlier, Harris properly debuted Helen, a walloping and agile shoegaze-in-the-garage trio with two Oregon homies, drummer Jed Bindeman and bassist Scott Simmons. The former drummer in the outbound Eternal Tapestry, Bindeman these days runs the great excavation labels Freedom to Spend and Concentric Circles; Simmons is in the knotty and gnarly Eat Skull and the blown-out psych syndicate The Lavender Flu. The trio’s debut, The Original Faces, alternately pummeled and swayed, Harris’ harmonies with herself cresting above the thrum like wind across a massif.

Helen finally returns in October with Linda’s Head, a remarkable and magnetic follow-up that has all the insistence and energy of the original but leans harder into sweetness and sadness. It opens with the brief “Faraway,” Harris crooning about loss and memory above an echo of doo-wop, before slamming into “Starline,” Bindeman and Simmons driving hard beneath Harris’ equivocal pleas to be set free. In the gap, Helen grew heavier and lighter. Bindeman and Simmons often hammer the beat then dance around it, but they ease up beautifully, too, as on “Canyon,” a closing eight-minute tone poem that feels like a hymn for moving forward, for drifting out of the bad times. This music isn’t passive or reclusive at all; Helen is a rock band of buds, gathering to share burdens and then swat them away.