Laundromat (BabyBlue Vinyl LP)

As Pickle Darling, Christchurch, New Zealand-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Lukas Mayo (they/them) zooms in on the universality of existential thought with earnest playfulness. After years of touring on previous albums, Bigness (2019, Z Tapes) and Cosmonaut (2021, Z Tapes) and supporting artists like Lucy Dacus and The Beths, Pickle Darling's third album, Laundromat, marks their debut with Father/Daughter Records. Laundromat finds magic in the mundane, pointing past perfectionism and instead leans into the art of the everyday. Art is everywhere: in the shape we make out of a napkin while waiting for our coffee to arrive, in the text we send to a friend in need, in the beat we make on the steering wheel while stuck at a red light.

Laundromat was created in what Mayo describes as their first stable living situation, away from difficult flatmates, tense surroundings, and abysmal landlords. As an artist who writes, records, and produces all of their music at home, the security of their current place allowed their ideas to blossom. Writing soon became a daily practice, and rather than labouring over each song like they had previously--some songs on previous records were months and months in the making--Mayo found themselves drawn to the spark of what had created the initial idea in the first place.

Mayo highlights folk artists Connie Converse, Bill Fay, and Vashti Bunyan as passengers in the process of Laundromat; artists who put music into the world then disappeared from the public eye. "I wanted to capture the feeling of making music that's out of step with everything around it," they explain. "I wanted it to be a lot more immediate." Mayo recorded a lot of Laundromat's ideas onto their phone, giving themselves permission to allow those ideas to be the entire song. The enforced length of what a song should be--a neat, 3-minute sellable product--has always bothered Mayo, and while some of the songs on Laundromat do fit around that particular mould, Pickle Darling says the smaller pockets on the album were them striving to create their "own kind of normal."