With a P.S. Eliot reunion and reissue on the horizon, now is as good a time as any to take stock of how blessed we are to have the Crutchfields around making music. Early Recordings contains some of the first songs Katie Crutchfield recorded as Waxahatchee, and it serves as a stepping stone between the scrappier punk of her youth and the more wistful, considered acoustics of the American Weekend variety and, hey, we can never have too much of either. Most of these songs have been floating around the web in some form for years now, but it’s nice to have them all in one officially-sanction place. Highlights include “Clumsy” (“Lately think about insecurity/ How I’m not real sure I even know what it means”) and the short and bittersweet “Whiskey + Math.”

“They came out five years ago as a super limited split cassette that was mostly for friends and family, and truth be told, I had largely forgotten about them until this spring while on a solo tour of the West Coast,” Crutchfield says of the collection. “At first I was tentative about re-listening to these recordings, but the nostalgia I felt when re-hearing them was warm, and I thought it might be nice to make them available again.” Listen below.

Early Recordings is out now via Merge Records.