After completing their self-proclaimed album trilogy with 2024's "Earthworks", New York duo Straw Man Army could quite easily have carried on doing what they already did brilliantly. Instead they disappeared into a cabin in the woods north of NYC for three 72-hour sessions and came back with something rather different.

The eleven songs on "True North" were written for acoustic instruments, pulling folk, psychedelia and kosmische music into Straw Man Army's already distinctive post-punk world. Fingerpicked guitars, piano, gong and vocal harmonies make the record sound deceptively peaceful, while underneath they're still wrestling with environmental collapse, violence, death, mental breakdown and a future that increasingly doesn't look much like the one we were promised. Beautiful and bloody unsettling at the same time.

This isn't Straw Man Army suddenly going soft - it's a genuinely adventurous next step from one of the most interesting bands to emerge from the current US punk underground. Released by La Vida Es Un Mus and including an A2 poster.