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First Listen: Phosphorescent, 'Muchacho'

Phosphorescent's new album, <em>Muchacho</em>, comes out March 19.
Courtesy of the artist
Phosphorescent's new album, Muchacho, comes out March 19.

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An Alabama native now based in Brooklyn, Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck sings with wryly weary raggedness to suit his late-at-night laments. Even when their arrangements feel grand and fleshed-out, epic and searching, Houck's best songs come off like intimate conversations with a confidante — wise and soft, and warmed by experience.

The gorgeous new Muchacho, out March 19, finds a way to aim heavenward while still hitting nerves closer to home. In a series of humbly soaring ballads that drift and bloom over five, six and even seven minutes, the band's sixth album captures a bit of the grandiose loveliness of Phosphorescent's choirboy-folk peers in Fleet Foxes and My Morning Jacket. But even as it aims for celestial bliss in songs with titles like "Sun, Arise! (An Invocation, An Introduction)," Phosphorescent remains rooted in dusty, personal, earthbound concerns, thanks in large part to the winningly roughed-up, beautifully human voice at its core.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)

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