This rising indie rock star has done his 10,000 hours, and it shows

By the time his first official, label-anointed album came out in 2024, Nate Amos had done his 10,000 hours. Over the years he’d uploaded scores of releases to Bandcamp under the name This Is Lorelei – work that, until recently, was just a side project to his long-running art-pop outfit Water From Your Eyes. Now, it’s coming into its own.

The years of compulsive attention to craft have paid dividends: his latest album, The Singer in My Band, is a tight, affecting collection of songs, flitting deftly between power-pop, alt-country and pop-punk.

There are goofy moments – like single Billy Came Back, a zippy jangle-pop tale of a local karaoke legend blowing back into town – but gut punches too, especially in the resonant, open-stringed numbers that fill the album’s second half. The arrangements are always catchy but rarely too sweet: even the earworm hook and cascading harmonies of highlight Oh No Now My are paired with a taut, digitally tortured guitar solo.

Though billed as a road album, written and recorded amid a relentless touring schedule, The Singer in My Band was finished at Amos’ family home with cameos from his father and sister, both professional bluegrass musicians.

It feels like a grounding moment in his trajectory – a return to centre as a solo artist, led by songwriting-first principles. Annie Toller

Zela Margossian Quintet, Remedy

★★★★

You know that feeling when you revisit a home from your past, to find the furniture changed and walls repainted, so any familiarity or nostalgia are jumbled with an unsettling newness? This third Zela Margossian Quintet album is like that.

The familiarity of the snaking melodies of Margossian’s Armenian roots, and of her rigorous classical training being entwined with jazz’s open-endedness, are still there, but her compositions are even more sophisticated and varied, with a delightful sense of mischief sometimes creeping in. The band, meanwhile, is joined by guest artists on four pieces, swelling the already expansive palette of colours generated by Margossian’s piano, Stuart Vandegraff’s saxophones, Jacques Emery’s bass, Alexander Inman-Hislop’s drums and Adem Yilmaz’s array of percussion.

Phil Slater’s trumpet cries gently over a lament called Indifferent World – a reality with which we’re all familiar. The stateliness of Jenny Eriksson’s viola da gamba features on What If, the title possibly asking what would happen were that instrument added to this already exotic band. The answer? A dreamy timelessness.

Virna Sanzone applies her plush voice to the Armenian lyrics of How I Wish, and flamenco guitarist Damian Wright makes Kintsugi glisten like sunlight on water. John Shand

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John Shand has written about music and theatre since 1981 in more than 30 publications, including for Fairfax Media since 1993. He is also a playwright, author, poet, librettist, drummer and winner of the 2017 Walkley Arts Journalism AwardConnect via X.