Hand Habits Indierock | Alternative 5 Items

Meg Duffy grew up in a small town in Upstate New York and they cut their teeth as a session guitarist and touring member of Kevin Morby’s band. The Hand Habits project emerged after Meg moved to Los Angeles; it started as a private songwriting outlet but soon evolved into a fully-fledged band with Meg at the helm. Hand Habits’ debut album, Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void), was released by Woodsist Records in 2017. The LP was entirely self-produced and recorded in Meg’s home during spare moments when they weren’t touring. Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void) is a lush, homespun collection of folk songs that found Meg in an exploratory state as an artist moving out on their own for the first time.

Two years later, Hand Habits has returned with their sophomore album, placeholder. To make this album, Meg chose to work in a studio and bring in collaborators, entrusting them with what had previously been a very personal creative process. Over the course of 12 tracks, Meg emerges with new confidence as both a bandleader and singer. This album is as tender and immediate as anything Meg’s ever written, but it’s also intensely focused and refined, the work of a meticulous musician ready to share their singular vision with the world.

The name placeholder stems from Meg’s fascination with the undefinable. Their songs serve as openings -- carved-out spaces waiting to be endowed with meaning. As a lyricist, Meg is drawn to the in-between, and the songs on this new album primarily confront the ways in which certain experiences can serve as a stepping stone on the road to self-discovery. “A big aspect of my songwriting and the way I move through the world depends on my relationships with people. The songs on placeholder are about accountability and forgiveness,” Meg says. “These are all real stories. I don’t fictionalize much.”

Meg describes these songs as their most direct to date, crafted with clear intention, and unlike Wildly Idle (Humble Before The Void), placeholder doesn’t meander. “It’s less of a submerged landscape and more a concise series of thoughts,” Meg explains. Instrumentally, placeholder can be situated alongside some of Meg’s folk-adjacent contemporaries like Angel Olsen or Big Thief, and the guitar work on this album proves that Meg continues to be one of the finest young musicians working today. placeholder is another entry in the Hand Habits songbook, but it’s also a valuable testament of our time. While placeholder inspires a sense of ease, simple questions rarely beget easy answers and Meg honors the indescribable joy and profound sorrow that comes with figuring things out, one step at a time.

Inspired by month-long songwriting class Duffy taught in the summer of 2021, they re-discovered, with newfound clarity, the generative capacity of embracing the unknown, and how essential collaboration and improvisation are for accessing the indescribable. Working with Luke Temple (Here We Go Magic, Art Feynman) and Philip Weinrobe (Adrienne Lenker, Cass McCombs), Duffy surrendered to the present moment, trusting that whatever sounds and words emerged were meant to emerge. With additional production, engineering and arranging from Jeremy Harris, Duffy created something which, in their words, “turned out nothing like I’d imagined it would.” The result of this collective experiment, born equally from play and intention, is a radical gift for listeners: proof that our most vital processes, creation and destruction, are exquisitely entangled. The unanswerable and untenable suffering of experience is the fact of perpetual loss. And, yet, there is precious, vivid magic created by this condition. In Sugar the Bruise, grief folds in on itself and becomes laughter; language fades away into sonic expanses of the inexpressible; melodies melt into cacophonies; love songs surrender to loss; historic violence is supplanted by the disks of sunlight. Pressed on milky white vinyl.