LABEL; Mtn Laurel
RELEASE DATE; 7 November, 2025
RATING; 3/5
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Hannah Pruzinsky’s second LP, Red Sky at Morning, is a quietly unnerving folk record that trades the wide-eyed tenderness of their debut for something more crooked and intimate. The album’s hushed center holds songs that feel like private confessions — simple guitar frames with sudden, uneasy flourishes — while production choices nudge the listener toward the uncanny rather than comfort.
From the slow-burn opener “Come” through the brittle “Arrival,” Pruzinsky maps a relationship’s small collapses with disarming specificity: domestic scenes, recurring anxieties, and the sensation of sinking beneath affection. The arrangements are deliberately restrained — brushes on drums, meandering synths, and occasional sax swells — which makes the album’s moments of distortion and vocal crackle land harder.
Standouts like “After Always” and the gothic-tinged “Krista” showcase h. pruz’s knack for shifting emotional registers in a single breath; tenderness lingers even when the instrumentation hints at claustrophobia. Felix Walworth’s production keeps the palette warm and lived-in even as songs flirt with surreal or macabre details.
Beyond the music, the project’s conceptual edges — a companion RPG-style booklet called Sailor’s Warning — amplify the record’s sense of journey and interior navigation, framing these tracks as snapshots from a larger, dreamlike narrative. It’s an album that rewards repeated listening: the melodies are modest but the emotional architecture is complex, folding nostalgia, dread, and tenderness into a compact, memorable whole.
If you liked the intimate, small-scale intensity of contemporary indie folk, Red Sky at Morning is an arresting next step for h. pruz — less sunny, more searching, and all the more human for it.
