Here’s a fun fact about the New York musician Emile Mosseri that Wikipedia just taught me: His older brother Adam is the guy who runs Instagram. Emile has done great work scoring the films The Last Black Man In San Francisco and Minari, and he got an Oscar nomination for the latter. Next year, Mosseri will release his new album Trying To Be Born, and we’ve already posted lead single “Don’t Fall Back So Easily.” But Mosseri’s new songs don’t come from that LP. Instead, he’s made two new holiday numbers with his friend Julianna Barwick.

At this point, you should be up on Julianna Barwick. She’s been making beautiful, cascading voice-and-loop-pedals music for well over a decade. Barwick released her most recent album Healing Is A Miracle in 2020. In recent years, she’s collaborated with people like Animal Collective, Nosaj Thing, and FaltyDL. “Snowpool” and “Home Alone,” the new tracks that she made with Mosseri, aren’t obvious holiday songs, and the latter is sadly not a cover of John Williams’ score for the titular film. (That score rips.) But the sheer beauty of Barwick’s multitracked choral vocals and Mosseri’s reverbed-out guitars taps into the cozy, joyous sense of awe that this whole season is supposed to represent. In a press release, Mosseri says:

I met Julianna a few years back through our friend Mary Lattimore. We got together and started hanging and jamming and recording music. We’ve done a few improvisational shows at Zebulon together here in LA and jammed a bunch at my studio. “Snowpool” was this beautiful melody that Julianna started singing that I was drawn to, and I wrote chords underneath it and arranging it for a choir. We performed it two years ago with a 32-piece choir at a holiday show here in LA. We recently re-recorded it and wanted to release it for the holidays. It’s named after the translation of Julianna’s friend Jónsi’s niece’s name Snjolaug (Icelandic for snowpool). Julianna said that the song reminded her of snow falling in a pool at night. The name and the song both feel very festive, and we wanted to create something in the tradition of more melancholic christmas music, i.e Vince Guaraldi, Lennon’s “Happy Christmas,” and some of those classic heartbreaking hymnals.

Listen to both tracks below.

“Snowpool” b/w “Home Alone” is out now on Greedy Heart.