Having things in the right place matters. It’s more than just a question of doing everything just right, being a tidy person or having a mathematical obsession. It can be a sign of hard work, of spending a lot of time together, of an understanding that goes beyond chemistry, a whole host of things. The Moth, Cancer House’s debut album, is reminiscent of Slint’s Spiderland. Beyond the aesthetics, the sound, the genre. The instruments are in order; everything happens at just the right moment. There is precision. However, what stands out most is the sense that what you’re hearing simply couldn’t exist any other way. Any single element out of place would create a feeling of dislocation, of disorder.
A quartet formed by Keeyan Haack, Lily Sharatt, Alex Furrh and Whitney Johnson (perhaps the best known of the four, with albums on Drag City and International Anthem), they hail from Chicago and embrace the current indie scene’s fascination with 1990s sounds such as slowcore and post-rock. Whilst the precision is reminiscent of Slint, the spaces through which the vocals drift are reminiscent of Bardo Pond (Lily’s voice, in particular, always seems to be somewhere else, in an underground realm), but the tone – the way Cancer House sound – doesn’t bring to mind anything specific. It is a distinctive sound, drowsy like that of Codeine, yet without the allure of drug-induced malaise; it aspires to remain in that state, to perpetuate it, to make it even greater. It seeks out what travels with drowsiness and what follows it.
A distinctive feature. It stems from them having played together for a long time, from their development as a unit. It goes beyond the sum of its parts; Cancer House’s sound on The Moth exists as a form of self-medication. Flowers Over There stands as the prime example of this, with the voices flowing, emerging in sequence without any apparent pattern, whilst in the background the music seems filled with sounds – more than just instruments – sounds that gradually stoke a kind of torment: one that, when it arises, takes the form of a scream, when least expected/when most expected, as in Slint’s Good Morning Spider.
Given everything that’s going on around us, music today plays a pivotal role. As a manifesto of unease, as resistance to what lies ahead. One can protest against everything, just as music can be an expression of that state, or rather, of a state in which we may find ourselves. Cancer House’s anaesthetic sound is the sleep that keeps us awake, the drawn curtains of a room we cannot leave, but where we also cannot sleep. Just lying in bed, accepting something akin to defeat. Their precision, their fascination with this state, and the way they prolong it, is a great triumph. It’s no easy feat to put on a show with original music in 2026, especially when it draws so heavily on the past. They pull it off.
AS