This is one of the many articles in the Mercury’s 2026 Halloween Issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
Eleven years is a long time between albums. Pacific Northwest shoegazers Helen aren’t pretending nothing’s changed, but the lowkey supergroup’s sound has stayed scuzzy and summery, even as their new LP, Linda’s Head, rushes in with currents of gravity and darkness.
Released by Chicago-born, Portland-based label Kranky on October 2, the 10 tight tracks of Linda’s Head hold onto some of the immediacy and delicacy of 2015’s The Original Faces, but their sound feels heavier, more battered and real.
In the interim years, vocalist and guitarist Liz Harris has moved through the Pacific Northwest and beyond as the ambient artist Grouper, while drummer Jed Bindeman and bassist Scott Simmons have remained ever-evolving fixtures of the region’s experimental music scene. The band’s last album felt like a remembered summer. Linda’s Head returns to that terrain in 2026 and finds the weather has turned.
Listening to Linda’s Head, I jotted a list of words on scrap paper: hazy, spectral, melancholy, soaked, haunted. But the terms felt indistinct, difficult to pin down. More concrete images took their place: salt, crashing waves, swells, gulls over cliffsides, shipwrecks, driftwood, erosion.
“Both names [Helen and Linda] reference a landform—Mount Saint Helens is our nearby volcano, and Linda’s Head is the name of a peninsula, but one that doesn’t really exist. An imaginary landform surrounded by churning ocean,” Harris explained. “Demon? Shadow? She is a little unknown.”
The first few songs on Linda’s Head crash into one another before you have time to come up for air. Harris’ voice sparkles with retro dreaminess, then disappears into echo and reverb. The songs last two minutes or less, feeling like snapshots or ideas in progress, but this isn’t to their detriment. That sparseness elicits a yearning for more and makes the album difficult to put down.
As “Endless Sky” transitions to “Linda’s Head,” the record starts to show its scale. The pace picks up. The title track pulses with fuzzy, thundering darkness, its lyrics vague yet spacious: “feel it all around / when the lights come down.” Then comes “Darkblue,” one of the album’s great acts of expansion. It’s long for Helen—about six minutes—and gives the album room to breathe. The shorter tracks that surround it feel more intentional in turn, like small parts of a wider landscape.
That landscape is definitely Pacific Northwestern.
“I think the new album straddles a few seasons,” says Bindeman. He describes the song “Dead Shark II” as “having that fleeting rush of the Portland summer, where you constantly feel like it’s going to end and turn into never-ending rain.” “Canyon,” he says, feels like “the epitome of summer into fall”: wet and changing leaves, time slowing down, rays of light splitting between clouds.
Harris agrees. “We all felt that this had to come out before deep winter, that it was a late summer- or autumn-feeling album,” she says.
Nature has often shown up in Harris’ work, particularly water—from the tidal track “Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping” on her 2008 Grouper record Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill to the intentional senses of submersion and evaporation developed across her albums A I A: Dream Loss and Alien Observer (2011).
“The ocean, storms, rain, the Columbia river mouth, they’re all on Linda’s Head,” she explains. “The way I play guitar sounds a little like the ocean.”
You can hear that idea on the “Dead Shark” songs. Acoustic guitar brings in honeyed warmth, and layered textures feel aquatic and surfy. The naturalistic feeling aligns with Harris’ instinct to look to nature for “metaphorical connection and answers,” she says. “I’ve talked to natural forces since I was little, so it feels intuitive to write songs this way.”
She remembers “being up late at night in Astoria… looking out the window at the river, glossy black and dotted with smears of shifting light from passing ships. I’m a night owl, not always by choice,” she explains. “I’ve stared out the window at the night-black Columbia so many times. It’s an old friend, a companion for sadness, thoughtfulness.”
For all its density, Helen’s sound has always had an intimate feel. Part of that comes from the band’s friendship. Harris and Bindeman started playing in Bindeman’s basement about 15 years ago. They knew that Simmons was “also a fan of weirdo music as well as scrappy pop songs,” Bindeman explains, and off they went.
“We all have lots of other projects going on… Helen is able to exist when time permits and our schedules line up. Those times feel very special and create an intimacy and spontaneity that can sometimes flatten when you get together to play every week,” Bindeman says.
“Maybe one source of the intimacy… is a kind of lack of pretense? And the real closeness we all have,” Harris adds. Their recording process reflects that. “A number of our songs are demos that we recorded to tape and then recorded over. We have a laid-back, improvisational approach as we record, though we can also be pretty particular,” she explains.
That approach makes Linda’s Head sound like the band has slipped back into a shared language. When Helen reconvenes, drums crash and guitars shimmer. There are storms on the horizon, and the ocean is deeper, but light still catches on its surface.
“I have never lived more than a mile or two from the coast. It’s a grounding place for me. I think of the ocean almost like a family member, a constant, a guardian,” says Harris.
That presence is everywhere on Linda’s Head—in its drenched reverb, its misty images. But like the album’s titular landmark, its music gives you a sense of place without pointing at it on a map. Helen’s weather is familiar, but still a little mysterious.
Linda’s Head was released on Kranky Fri, Oct 2 and is available as a digital download, vinyl LP, or CD at both Kranky and Grouper Bandcamp pages. Bindeman will carry vinyl LPs at his shop, Little Axe Records, 4142 NE Sandy, littleaxerecords.com.
