Elanor Moss explores love's vulnerability in debut album; Jack Wolter of Penelope Isles keeps his ears listening via bluetooth
This is Punk Rock Bach for Aug. 6, 2026.
Anglophiles rejoice! This issue of Punk Rock Bach is very UK-heavy, though not quite in a ‘60s “British-invasion” kind of way.
I spoke with London-based songwriter Elanor Moss, whose debut album “The Knife, The Needle” is set to release toward the end of the month.
Plus, Jack Wolter of the Brighton-based band Penelope Isles shares which records he’s listening to and how he’s listening.
I will admit, however, this week’s “What I’m Listening to” section is a bit jarring compared to the rest of this issue and very American!
Onward!
A ‘happy accident’ leads to a chamber-style debut for Elanor Moss
Two moments in Elanor Moss’ upcoming album aim to bring the audience into the recording studio: A slow breath after the song “Again, My Love” and a spoken-word preface — “Alright, ‘Secrets,’ take two…” in a gentle whisper — to “Secrets of the Universe.”
“That was a decision that I made with Peter Miles, who was co-producing and engineering the record with me,” Moss said. “And he takes a lot of care in sequencing everything. And I think when we were listening through everything and putting everything in order, we felt like it worked really nicely to have those intermediary moments left in.”
Moss said those moments on her debut album reinforced a sense that the musicians and the listeners were “all in one place together and creating a sense of space.”
“I think that felt important, and it feels quite intimate, which was what we were looking for, really,” Moss said.
Moss’ album, “The Knife, The Needle,” is set to release on Aug. 21 via Merge Records. She said the album’s name comes from the record’s first track, “Fixer” — a track for which she had an idea long before she wrote it.
“I remember walking around and like having this sort of image of like what it’s like to fall in love with someone, and for that, it’s like such a vulnerable thing,” she said. “Like in order for you to really go deeply into that process. You have to sort of be really vulnerable, and vulnerability is like… it’s just innately very exposing.”
She said the thought came to her of a small animal bearing all in vulnerability. That image, she said, developed into a metaphor of when you love someone, you give them a knife, which Moss says is “all of the things that make you specifically as a person really vulnerable.”
“So that image of the knife as this kind of like thing that encapsulates all of your difficult parts, your vulnerable parts, that was there for a while,” she said.
Eventually, after a false start or two, Moss wrote “Fixer” in one sitting.
“And as that song was ending, the idea came through the writing, really, to do what I’d sort of discovered through living, which is that by the very act of handing over the knife, can turn it into a needle, can make it this thing that is soothing and healing, and, you know, stitching together, taking that scary thing and shrinking it down to size,” she said. “And being like, ‘Actually, this isn’t so bad. This could be a good thing. This difficult, tricky thing could be a good thing.’”
Bringing in the strings
The album that’s coming later this month is actually a second version of the record.
“I made a whole different version of the album about a year before recording this version that had a slightly different track list,” she said. “I hadn’t written some of the songs for the final version yet. And it was very Americana. It had, like, drums and bass and a bit more traditional instrumentation, like band instrumentation.”
Moss said the version that is being released, which includes strings and horn instruments, “happened slightly by accident.” She said not all members of her band were available ahead of a London performance. She said she asked her friend Matthew Herd, who plays saxophone in the band, what he thought of having available band members use their second instruments for a chamber arrangement.
“And Matthew is absolutely brilliant,” she said. “He’s a songwriter as well, and he’s just got such an amazing sensibility with everything that he touches. It’s just like total magic.”
She said she gave Herd references such as the musicians Judee Sill and Nick Drake, and he created the arrangements.
“And so it was kind of out of necessity in a way,” she said. “Like, I sort of had the idea in my mind for a little while. It was very different to what we’d done in New York, the New York versions, but it was slightly out of necessity. It was sort of a barrier that we’d come up against in not being able to perform the songs full band in this performance that we wanted to do together. So, yeah, it was a sort of a happy accident.”
Lyrical vs. instrumental
Moss has filled “The Knife, The Needle” with mostly lyrical tracks, though it does include one entirely instrumental song. She said allowing herself to play with her instrument helped break her out of a bout of writer’s block.
“I feel quite a lot like making this album was really a process of finding some kind of new relationship with songwriting,” she said. “And I think one of the things that really helped me was returning to, or trying my hardest to return to, a place of childlike play and exploration, and — you know — sitting down with a guitar and just letting something happen and not gripping on too tightly, and the same with lyric writing.”
The album’s instrumental song doesn’t have a real name, she said, and is titled “improvisation” on the record.
“I had a loose idea of what I would do with the guitar, and I had a line of saxophone in my mind because there was no singing voice,” Moss said. “I was like, it would be really nice if there were a voice for this track. And Matthew has such a beautiful sort of tender way of playing the saxophone. It always feels like another voice to me when I hear him play. So, I sort of hummed him the start, the melody line that I thought was really beautiful, and then I just kind of left it to everybody. And everyone is an incredibly, you know, gifted player in the band. They’re all much better than me, so it felt like very easy.”
That track also includes a small technical glitch, she said.
“We were at the end of a reel, so the take that’s on the album was the last take that we did, and we’d gotten to the end of the reel, and it malfunctioned, and the machine was pulling the tape this way and that way, which created a pitch shift that was happening,” she said. “So there’s this kind of slurring up and slowing down of the key in a couple places, which we decided to keep because we thought it was nice.”
Elanor Moss’ debut album “The Knife, The Needle,” is set to release on Aug. 21 via Merge Records. It is available for pre-order via Merge’s website.
Penelope Isles’ Jack Wolter on discovering vinyl crackle via Steely Dan’s ‘Dirty Work’
Penelope Isles’ next album is fast approaching.
Siblings Jack Wolter and Lily Wolter, along with their friend Joe Taylor performing percussion, are set to release the record “3” on Sept. 25 via the Bella Union label.
It includes the tracks “Another Kind of Love,” “Thinking Seat” and “I Loved You Robert Pattinson.”
This week, Punk Rock Bach got in touch with Jack Wolter to ask how he’s listening to music. He talks about discovering vinyl’s crackle and discovering The Pointer Sisters’ album ‘Energy’ when he was a kid.
Editor’s note: Q&A has been lightly edited for style, syntax and typos.
Punk Rock Bach: How do you prefer to listen to music?
Jack Wolter: Streaming is my go-to, as I’m traveling a lot at the moment. But, I collect cassettes and records. One day, I will wake up with nothing to do, but listen to an LP at home, blasting tunes into the garden whilst I tend to my sunflowers.
PRB: What are you listening to now?
Wolter: I saw West Side Cowboy the other day at a festival in Spain and thought they were that great guitar band that comes about every now and then. I still need to listen to their recorded stuff though.
AtticOmatic. They are friends of ours from Brighton. Their music feels like they are excited about making songs.
I love Burrow and Lewin. And LL Burns have a song called ‘Ten Years Now’ that I am spinning a lot at the moment.
PRB: What is your favorite music listening memory?
Wolter: Probably finding The Pointer Sisters’ ‘Energy’ album in my Mum’s record collection when I was about 9 and discovering the song “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan. What a song. The combination of discovering the crackle of vinyl and their cover was magic.
PRB: What do you listen on?
Wolter: A phone with my Sony overhead Bluetooth headphones. Noise cancelling activated. And then the CD player in the car when I’m home.
PRB: What’s your favorite music discovery in the last year?
Wolter: Tyler Ballgame. ‘For The First Time, Again’ is a gorgeous album. The man has a voice of an angel.
Penelope Isles’ album “3” is set to release on Sept. 25 via the Bella Union label.It is available for pre-order and pre-save across various platforms.
What I’m listening to…
This week I’m revisiting an album I thought was hysterical in high school but now look at it a bit more critically and as a window into the world of 1999.
I didn’t purchase it when I was 17, sadly, but grabbed the digital version at 43.
I’m listening to Bloodhound Gang’s “Hooray for Boobies.”
It’s a title that isn’t quite PC by today’s standards, let alone 1999’s — but it seems like that’s part of the point. Music is supposed to say something — whether that message is beautiful, thought-provoking, offensive or dangerous.
But above all, music should be expressive.
Bloodhound Gang’s tracks on the album, from the song “The Bad Touch” to “Magna Cum Nada,” are inarguably expressive.
Even the song title “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When The Stripper Is Crying” paints a picture (if you think the title is bad, the song lyrics are much more disturbing).
As I prefaced, the album is a window into the world of 1999 — albeit wildly sophomoric in nature. It’s not for everyone, but for late ‘90s high schoolers with more appreciation for shock than taste, the record jams.
Thank you for reading! We’re back next week with an interview with Immersion’s Colin Newman and Malka Spigel, whose new album “What is Lost will Return” is set for a September release. See you next Thursday!