Hush

Landing on Mom+Pop a few weeks after a summer of Lollapalooza and Hinterland sets, Hush is the first full-length from a Minneapolis five-piece whose reputation was built onstage. The question the record answers is whether that live force survives being pressed to tape. Mostly it does. Eleven songs run for roughly thirty-five minutes, and very little of it is slack.

The sequencing does most of the work. "Arctic" opens with the band already leaning in, and "Paranoia" keeps the guitars loud. Then "Violence" drops to about a minute of bare acoustic playing and a voice pulled close to the microphone. That hinge makes "Under" land harder, with its thick riffs and a vocal that goes for the back wall. Two guitars trade lines rather than stacking into a wall, and the drums hit with a plainness that suits the choruses better than the quieter songs.

Jackie Uhas is the pivot. Her delivery swings from a bruised near-whisper to a full roar within a single verse, and the songs, mostly about the wreckage of a bad relationship, rely on that swing. "Living Room Blues" slows toward a ballad, while "Crossfire" weighs the fear of carrying old damage into something new. Hush reads less like a retreat than a band testing how far it can push before the quiet starts to feel like a setup.