Album Review: The Weightless Hour by Juanita Stein

With a sense of hope and rebirth, her fourth album also has all the elements that made Howling Bells such a satisfying listen Juanita Stein is probably still best known as the voice of Howling Bells, the Australian band who produced four albums of excellent Americana/roots music, before going on hiatus ten years ago. That hiatus was broken in 2022 when the band reunited to perform their debut album at a series of gigs, but otherwise Stein has spent the last decade concentrating on her solo career. The Weightless Hour is Stein’s fourth solo album, and she’s teamed up again with producer Ben Hillier who worked on her previous album Snapshot.

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Similarly to Laura Marling's 'Patterns In Repeat' earlier this year - another record that saw its author, several acts into their career, stripping things back to their most minimal of ingredients - 'The Weightless Hour' feels like a record that could only have been made with age and experience. Eschewing drums throughout and leaning into the folkier side of her songwriting, it finds Juanita Stein in a reflective, measured space - looking back at the giddy, naive early days of her first band Howling Bells on 'The Game', and her Jewish ancestry on the evocative, country-leaning 'Old World'. Despite the sparser palette, 'Daily Rituals' still manages to concoct the brooding, minor chord tension that's sat at the core of Stein's best work since those early days, but there are also sweet, simple moments to be found; the lullaby of 'Carry Me', with the sound of crickets chirping in the background, is little more than a finger-picked acoustic and Stein's underrated, consistently rich vocals.

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Four years on from her last studio album, Juanita Stein is reintroducing herself through a big shift in her musical approach. On The Weightless Hour, Stein massively scales back her arrangements, setting her voice at the centre and letting a healthy amount of reverb help her and her guitar fill in the space. But while Stein's arrangements are frequently simple, they are never sparse.

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