Gone are the albums of knights and dragons
Gone are the kings and queens of Camelot
We're going to Hel
We're dying to be someone on a road to somewhere
This album is what happens when we expire
This album is a banned four loko
This album is the burger king on Columbus st
This album is Purgatorio
This album will make you sing songs of praise
Heavy is the head that wears a hat
We hope you like and savor the flavors of heaven
as we walk together hand in hand
as saxophones whine and trumpets pound
Kick me out and put a hole in my head
We're going home, Sally
So announces Emily Moales' latest album as Star Moles, Highway To Hell, released via her home studio/label/collective Historic New Jersey. On Feb. 26, Highway To Hell became her 44th new release and her 9th canonical album since she started recording and releasing music from her teenage bedroom in 2017. If you're new to Star Moles, then "Gone are the albums of knights and dragons/ Gone are the kings and queens of Camelot" will sound like gobbledygook, but it's a substantial pivot for the musician whose songs tended to emerge from interplay with folk epics and fairy tales.
Highway To Hell is the statement of an artist who's tried everything — concept albums, GarageBand, analog recording, gratuitous synths, piano ballads — and is itching to make a statement free of gimmicks but loaded with charm. When listening to Highway To Hell, it's hard to believe that this is Star Moles stripped back. Her folksy, psychedelic whimsy shines through on a suite of 10 songs addressing the Philly life with which she's fallen in love and the global polycrisis that tempers her joy. Even if it's somewhat reserved, it's still all there.
Moales didn't come from the world's most musical family, but there's a persistent, latent love of music that colors her lineage. Her parents are classic rock heads with a taste for 2000s anthems by Wolfmother and the Chicks; her grandmother's devout Christianity shone through in her singing at Sunday worship. If you follow her family tree to its fringes, you'll find Red Sovine, the truck-driving country legend who bumped elbows with Hank Williams and Webb Pierce on his come-up.
Where Sovine's best-known hits are spoken-word, Moales prefers to use her voice to its greatest potential. "I've always been a Kate Bush fan, somewhat obviously," she explains. "When I first started listening to her music, I realized I didn't have to sound cool and chill all the time. You can sound awesome and amazing doing everything you can do with your voice." Whether she's going with chorus-soaked psych-pop or keeping it simple with guitar and voice, Moales prefers a bold voice. It's less about drawing you in as it is about grabbing you by the wrist and transporting you to the Star Moles universe, whether or not you're ready. She also counts Enya, Ty Segall, and MGMT as key influences, and you can hear their divergent approaches to making mind-melding, immersive music throughout Moales' discography.
Moales wasn't in love with what formal opportunities she had to pursue music at school in suburban New Hampshire, but a pal she met at music camp introduced her to musicians who recorded themselves and released their musings with tools she already had at her fingertips. "When I found out that people record incredible albums by themselves, I realized that I have something with which I could record and I should do that," Moales explains. She looked up to Foxygen and Todd Rundgren for their homemade ingenuity and became the musician she wanted to see in the world with GarageBand.
Over a gap year following high school graduation, Moales grew comfortable with home recording, sharing mini-albums on Bandcamp like the swoogh!, god made you 2 be famous, Be My Valentine, and The Second Coming Of Helen Burns over about six months, with loosies and covers interspersed. "I'm easily intimidated by new technology," Moales admits, "so when I recorded myself, I usually used my same favorite keyboard plus default GarageBand plugins." The Second Coming Of Helen Burns gets its sun-drenched psychedelic sound from Moales' obsession with GarageBand's chorus effect. "When I started recording music, I was enamored by the whole synth range of sound," she says. "I liked everything that sounded weird and not man-made."
While trying to retain some privacy as she recorded at home and then, eventually, at her first year of college, Moales cultivated a friendship with New Jersey-based Kevin Basko, the onetime touring member of Foxygen who'd been building a home recording studio called Historic New Jersey to support his friends' music and his own as Rubber Band Gun. To call Rubber Band Gun "prolific" is underselling it; in the time it would take to listen to everything Rubber Band Gun has recorded and released, Basko will have released at least one more full-length. Moales had been keeping up with Basko because she looked up to Foxygen. "He told me that he checked out my music because I had a Barbra Streisand profile picture [on Twitter] and he's a huge fan," recalls Moales. Basko invited Moales down to New Jersey in 2018 to record what became Camelot, her first canonical full-length, with a handful of collaborators.
Making Camelot helped establish the creative relationship Moales and Basko maintain to this day in the row house they share in South Philadelphia. Moales tries to record a respectable demo as soon as an idea emerges because she gets "easily bored" of her own ideas. "I would describe Kevin as locked in," Moales says. "He is a true music lover and a music lifer. All he wants to do is make and record music…I wouldn't call him a perfectionist, but he cares about the music you're making with him." She'll bring demos to Basko, and they'll cast aside the ones that are too perfect. Together, they look for ideas that need TLC, where they each have room to make significant edits or rearrangements. As eternal fans of home recording and DIY releasing, they see too-perfect demos as completed projects better suited for loose release or as part of Moales' growing collection of self-recorded albums.
Between their first creative venture at the Basko family home and a summer writing and recording blitz in the Pennsylvania mountains that helped birth 2019's The Magic Of Believing What You See, Moales and Basko developed a rapport so strong it inspired them to move together to Philadelphia, where they've filled their basement with a panoply of recording tools. Mere days after arriving in Philadelphia, the world shut down in an effort to slow the spread of a new respiratory virus.
"While everything was scary, being stuck inside was kind of big for developing Historic New Jersey into what it is today," Moales says. The home studio has grown into a collective shared between Moales, Basko, and choice friends. Bands like Lightheaded and Thank You Thank You have generated some of their finest work in the studio. In recent years, Historic New Jersey has served as a label for Sam & Louis Sullivan and Hot Machine, Basko and Moales' kooky art-rock collaboration. What began as a one-man mobile operation has become a sought-out experience with an established home.
Highway To Hell isn't the first Star Moles album that Moales has recorded under the Historic New Jersey banner, but it's definitely the most Historic New Jersey album she's released. Moales wrote and recorded the album with what's become the Historic New Jersey in-house band — Basko, Sam Sullivan, Jem Seidel, and herself — and the album arrived via Historic New Jersey's slowly growing label profile.
Historically, Star Moles projects are highly adorned, often featuring deep engagement with literature (e.g., Arthurian legend on Camelot, Andreas Capellanus on Snack Monster). When we talk about her prior albums, Moales spends more time thinking about how she intended the album to fit in her oeuvre than the feelings she may have been processing at the time: She identifies The Magic Of Believing What You See as the album she wanted to prove herself as a serious musician; she locates Three Chimes, At Silent Palace! as the Hounds Of Love to Fight Or Flight Or Freeze's The Dreaming. She discusses how she was missing her sci-fi synth pop phase when she decided to take some disorganized recordings and package them as Multidimension Sugarbliss. Each track has its own distinctive emotional profile, but Star Moles songs and albums have felt more indebted to questions of aesthetic position, literary exploration, or recording strategy.
As noted in the aforementioned Bandcamp screed, Highway To Hell reduces those fantastical exercises in search of something more immediate. "The simpler arrangements are why this feels so much different from past albums," Moales elaborates. "I didn't feel the need to fill every space, and I realized that the space makes you pay attention to what's happening." It would be unfair to call every project "maximalist," but Moales describes each song as having extra effects or instrumental moves that she designed to scream, "Hey! Look over here!" Highway To Hell is pared back; you can hear it immediately on opener "The End." It's just her spirited vocal delivery, her piano, and a minimalist drum beat, allowing one of her best-ever opening lyrics to stand out: "If I put my shirt on backwards one more time I swear/ This will be the darkest Tuesday in a thousand years."
Highway To Hell isn't entirely devoid of fantastical imagery, but Moales juxtaposes that against her quotidian existence. Take "Halo," where she sings, "While you wrote your secret letters/ I was fighting the bagel machine/ I was throwing my weight/ With no muscle to give." The figures in "Halo" keep talking past each other, misrecognizing the other, living in worlds that seem so far apart that one might as well be living in a cheap thriller. Then there's "Real Magic," where being entrusted to sell mystical wares feels less like connecting people with the supernatural and more like every other retail gig. "It's hard to believe that I'm one person who works retail, makes music, and hangs out with friends at a bar. It's hard to believe that's all the same person," Moales explains. Highway To Hell confronts that uncanny feeling you get as you move between your individual selves to get by in disparate situations. Is it discomforting, alienating? A little, but also, isn't there something magical about our own malleability?
Highway To Hell's most remarkable moments come from songs with an understated presence, where some of the most resonant Star Moles lyrics have more space to breathe than ever. "Overdog" is, at its core, a midtempo piano ballad where Moales tends to hang out in a comfortable middle area of her vocal range. It's from this position of relative simplicity that she can meditate on the abuses wrought by society's most powerful and sing, "I need you like I need a hole in my head/ I need a hole in my head/ How else could I sing?"
The undulating guitar and percussion lines on "Time" settle the song into an icy groove that give way to Moales' stoic resolution: "I don't want to hear from you anymore/ You take all my time/ Not another tear for you." It's simple, but it's catchy. Star Moles songs often are — I'd describe my favorites, "Agravaine" and "Talking Is Torture" as such — but "Time" is understated and openly ambivalent. Highway To Hell's charms have way more room to shine compared to prior albums, where ostentation and cleverness presented themselves in equal measure. That kind of balance makes for a thrilling, overwhelming listen. Highway To Hell is just as thrilling, but presented with a reassuring, humanizing clarity.
"I will definitely be drawn into some other sound. I still have that urge to recreate sounds that I hear," Moales explains, but then she tempers that: "I do feel like this album learned from all the other albums." Ever since Moales embraced home recording in her teenage bedroom, she's been attracted to new extremes of sound, process, and theme. In doing so, Moales has built Star Moles into an institution of off-the-wall songwriting, cerebral and incandescent, reminiscent of Kate Bush but with a cool that feels akin to MGMT or Cameron Winter.
With Highway To Hell, we get a peek into Moales' life and the thought experiments that preoccupy her. It's gently confessional, but couched in a Joni Mitchell-like whimsy. As much fun as it can be to watch an artist lurch from sound to sound and theme to theme to denote new eras (see the last 20-or-so years of Björk), witnessing that same artist go back to basics feels like a collective exhale, and it's even more relieving when the art retains its charisma. That's the exact sweet spot where Star Moles has landed after all these years.
Highway To Hell is out now via Historic New Jersey. Buy it here.
