Skullcrusher – has released her highly anticipated album ‘And Your Song is Like a Circle’ with the single

Skullcrusher has released her highly anticipated album, And Your Song is Like a Circle, out now via her new label home Dirty Hit. Alongside the release, Helen Ballentine has announced the first Skullcrusher North Americanheadline tour in years, kicking off in March 2026 and wrapping in mid-April. Tickets on-sale HERE. 

Recorded over a period of years following the release of her celebrated 2022 debut, Quiet the Room, And Your Song is Like a Circle does not capture experience – it gestures toward the imprint of an experience that is uncapturable. Swaying between elegant folk and crystalline electronics, landing somewhere in the snowfields shared by Grouper and Julia Holter, Circle probes the ways that grief turns itself inside out. Loss itself becomes as real and substantial as what’s been lost. 

Ballentine began writing Circle after leaving Los Angeles, a city she’d called home for nearly a decade. She ended up returning upstate to New York’s Hudson Valley, where she was born and raised, leaving her chosen family to return to her blood family. 

In a recent interview with PAPER Magazine, Ballentine opened up about her struggles with addiction during the making of Circle, experiencing major disassociation and loss before entering rehab in the Winter of 2024. Comparing that time to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Descent Into The Maelstrom,” she says “It almost felt like I was on the precipice of some kind of powerful force. If I went closer to it, I would never escape from it.”

Several years of intense isolation followed, and Ballentine immersed herself in films, books, and art that reflected the rupture of relocating cross-country and its dissociative aftershocks. If Skullcrusher’s first album rendered the detailed intimacies of domestic space, Circle finds itself vaporized across the landscape: swirling, drifting, searching. It skirts an event horizon in long, slow strokes.

Lead single ‘Exhale’ is built around gorgeous vocal filigrees that fan out into a haze of synthesizers and strings. Opening track ‘March,’ is a stark piano reverie laced with flickering electronics and ambient layers. Watch an intimate, stripped back performance of the heartwrenching song HERE. Third single ‘Dragon’ is a gorgeous, murky pop song that lets piano echo over tight, gritted percussion, and the lush and harmony-laden ‘Living’ came accompanied by a live performance, watch HERE. 

Tracklist:
01 March
02 Dragon
03 Living
04 Maelstrom
05 Changes
06 Periphery
07 Red Car
08 Exhale
09 Vessel
10 The Emptying

AND YOUR SONG IS LIKE A CIRCLE