Ruth Garbus, “Profound”

Ruth Garbus has spent years refining a style that feels both gentle and disorienting. On her new album Profound, the Vermont songwriter’s whispery soprano, delicate guitar, and soft electronic touches form a surface of almost childlike simplicity. But underneath, the songs are tightly wound, pulling the familiar into strange shapes.

Garbus got her start in Feathers, a short-lived Vermont folk-rock collective that also included King Tuff’s Kyle Thomas and Chris Weisman. The eerie contours of her early work foreshadowed what she builds here: a sound that uses mundane imagery as a doorway. On “Sunny Summer Guy,” she itemizes beach-day pleasures—Italian ice, a red rubber ball, a favorite song—while overdubbed harmonies float the track toward something ungraspable. Like Joni Mitchell, Garbus rarely lands squarely on a melody; she flutters around it, letting the meaning hover.

Her lyrics often anchor cosmic epiphanies in the physical. Album opener “Tip of the Hat to Fleur” begins with shivering ’70s keyboards and a spectral melody, then veers into a frank celebration of pegging: “When I penetrated that man I felt just like a dog/ Getting fucked is the season of the world.” The bluntness doesn’t shock; it makes the mystical feel earned. Later, on “Clair de Lune,” Garbus maps a landscape of dancers and masqueraders, singing in a minor key about sadness disguised as beauty. The album title is not irony. It’s an instruction.