Companion: Black Vinyl LP

When Justin Morris moved to New York City in 2010 after a lifetime in North Carolina, he was planning to do the opposite of what people usually move to the city to do: give up on his dream. Since childhood, that dream had been simple — write songs, play in bands, live inside “indie rock.” But a run selling merch for one of the era’s biggest indie stars unsettled that conviction. From his vantage point on the bus, the everyday grind of touring felt out of step with the spellbinding shows; success gave way to a working reality that showed him the job-like side of something once romanticized and left him wondering where the glow had gone. To his green worldview, the gap between the fantasy of “making it” and its reality was jarring. If this was the dream, he thought, maybe it needed to be reconsidered. New York was meant to be a clean slate, maybe even the place he’d learn another trade and leave music behind. Then, less than a day into his Bushwick sublet, a man with a gun kicked in his bedroom door, forced him to the floor, and tied his hands with TV cables. In the days after the robbery, unable to make sense of anything except through song, he started writing again. Those songs became the beginning of a new project he called Sluice.

Sluice, now a four-piece band from Durham, North Carolina — with Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle — return with Companion, their third album on Mint Records. A debut full-length 2022’s Radical Gate, the quietly beloved record Morris made after relocating back to North Carolina, was followed by the warm, collaborative Sluice (2023), recorded with then-stranger Chris Lilienthal at his Carrboro studio. Companion takes place during a time of intense personal change, often centered around Morris’s evolving relationship to identity, memory, and domestic life.

Companion is the biggest showcase of Kenny Chesney and Alan Jackson. The “companion” shifts sometimes he’s named Gary, Bury, or Doe Eyes; sometimes she’s a dog sleeping out the door in the morning, sometimes it’s Morris himself catching his reflection in a bathroom mirror and muttering, “you do love you.” Sometimes it’s the carpentry crew, the townies, the bandmates; the old one-tracks who wander back into his life. In his matter-of-fact, without-irony lyrical style that Pitchfork once described as “re-education in sincerity,” these people feel real because they are. And always close at hand is music itself, the companion that almost slipped away.

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