Deerlady, the hypnotic indie rock duo who were a Stereogum Band To Watch in 2024, are no more. Guitarist Magdalena Abrego, one half of the duo, announced that she was leaving earlier this year. Today, Abrego releases the new album Xolo, her first-ever solo release. It's an experimental mood-piece of a record that works as a kind of conceptual piece about loss.
The title Xolo is not a play on the word "solo." Instead, the album is named after the xoloitzcuintli, a dog breed that represents the process of moving into the afterlife in Mexican culture. Abego grew up with immigrant parents in Chicago, and she went on to study guitar performance at the New England Conservatory of Music before becoming a faculty member there. Abrego recorded the album in Brooklyn, and it's got her on vocals, guitar, synth, electronics, and ocarina, as well as some very personal field recordings. Only two other musicians appear: bass clarinetist Allison Burik and pianist Sonya Belaya. Here's what Abrego says about the album:
Lately, I look around and notice all the quiet ways that our ability to foster deep connection is at threat, especially as we are encouraged to embrace individualism, understand ourselves as self-sufficient, and accept displacement as inevitable, as though being uprooted were simply another condition of modern life. I’ve begun to believe that connection is not something we inherit; it is something we have to practice, protect, and even fight to keep.
For me, processing what I’ve been through so publicly feels like an act of rebellion against the structures that encourage us to carry our suffering alone. What I know now is that there is a kind of power in looking backward to understand the ones who came before us as not simply gone, but alive in the ways we show care, in the gestures we repeat without knowing where they began, and in what we choose to pass on. Perhaps survival is not simply making it through the darkness. Perhaps it is learning how to become a light that someone else, not yet here, will one day recognize.
Xolo is out in full today. Right now, its only available for purchase and streaming on Bandcamp. Check it out below.
