While 2025 was another year filled with dread, there were other layers of peculiarity to it: where new music was concerned, the fact there was none of it from Matt Christensen.
The Chicago songwriter is most underrated voice across the new music landscape. Whether it be through the lens of Zelienople, under his own name or via his various collaborations, Christensen has been the architect of some of the most vital moments committed to tape this decade. Which made his 2025 sabbatical strange, to the point where many (including myself) thought that he’d dropped off the face of the earth.
“No, not all,” says Christensen, when asked whether his pause was by design. “I was just being inactive for no good reason,” he says. “I simply forced myself back into making music again. The same old doubt crept back in, and I had to will myself back into productivity. It seems like that’s how it usually goes. It was easier to get back into it than I thought it would be.”
On January 20, the Bandcamp notification that altering the world of Christensen’s resumption has proved to be the best gift of 2026. And following Talk About It, three releases have followed since. The pick of them, Christensen’s new band, In A Waterfall In A Wood. Featuring his Zelienople bandmate, Brian Harding and Slow Planes’ Tim Breen, the trio deliver one of the year’s best sleeper records with their self-titled debut LP.
Recorded at Jamdek studios with Doug Malone in 2022, A Waterfall In A Wood has spent four years rising to the boil. Whether by design or not is irrelevant. The works of both Christensen and Breen possess a timelessness charm, crystallising the beautiful ebb and flow of life. With so much work in Christensen’s pipeline in particular, was it the intention of releasing this album under a new alias?
“We always intended for this to be a band,” says Christensen, who alongside Breen and Harding, recently answered a series of questions over email. “The sequence of the album alternates between songs that Tim wrote and sang on, and ones that I wrote and sang on. It was intentional and rehearsed,” offers Christensen, who admits it’s something that he’s not necessarily used to. “I thank Tim for that. He was good at making us rehearse without squashing the life out of the songs,” he says.
“I could be wrong, but I remember taking a job as a drummer,” adds Breen, usually at the front of the stage as leader of Slow Planes. “But we had been recording a lot at that point, with Matt and I alternate writing, so it developed quickly that the band would operate in the same way. The name came a little bit into the process. It’s from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk.”
Zelienople (photo: Christopher Michael-Hefner - left: Matt Christensen; seated: Brian Harding)Having worked together before on various other projects (Christensen also featured on Slow Planes’ excellent 2022 self-titled release), it’s interesting to hear what made this project different from the others. “I don’t know,” admits Christensen. “We all gelled pretty quickly and had an identity. I think a lot of that had to do with Tim’s drumming and programming and Brian’s planned bass lines. I just did the same old shit that I usually do.”
“Certainly for me playing drums is a rare treat,” adds Breen “There is a general philosophy in this group of pairing instruments down as much as possible so everything in the mix has to be essential and it was cool to focus on making the sequencer work as a kind of architecture in all the tunes,” he says. “Brian and Matt have a long-practiced collaboration that comes effortlessly and I was just trying to keep up and bring something interesting to that experience.”
Harding’s bass lines have always moved mysteriously, and from the start on A Waterfall In A Wood’s opener, The New Pilots, he pulls these songs to the edges of darkness. “Playing bass with Tim and Matt is an easy process for me – in the best way,” he says. “They create a space in which a repetitive, meditative bass works. There was no pressure to carry the song which allowed me to play what came naturally.”
Like Harding’s lust for darkness, his bandmates songwriting has inhabited life’s darker corners. That doesn’t change on A Waterfall In A Wood. The contrast on Modified where the protagonist is on the precipice of a relationship breakdown (“Me coming down, feel you coming undone too”), only for Christensen to then shape the song with surrealist imagery by way of those “Campers on the moon.”
“I usually write from that perspective,” admits Christensen. “It’s pretty much my wheelhouse/curse.” There are extra shades of that darkness on Whisper in the Grass. Anchored by Harding’s droning bass lines, there’s more entwining of the abstract and realism, as Christensen emerges from the wreckage (“You can tell by the trail of blood / That’s behind me”).
On Housework, he maintains this approach, in what feels like you’re being pulled from a fever dream and placed back into a mundane reality. The backdrops of McDonalds and the local butcher, vignettes where the listener, indeed, becomes, “Surrounded by creatures in your old neighbourhood.”
Breen has equally captivating moments. Gray Cloud, the kind of song that freezes an audience in a trance-state. Not before his watershed moment on And Swiftly. In what is cinematic slowcore of the best kind, Breen offers new possibilities. It’s something that could have been a backdrop to a Cormac McCarthy novel. “We had separate ideas, and that song is Tim really nailing it,” says Christensen.
“That’s very sweet,” counters Breen. “I wasn’t sure if that song would fit, but there it is. There are a few poetic references in the song that have been with me a long time and somehow found a home here.”
The creative depth of In A Waterfall In A Wood, so fierce and wholesome that it makes it all the more astonishing to learn that it was recorded in just one session. “I think that we had practiced enough beforehand, so we had the ability to grab those preferable first takes,” explains Christensen. The songs, recorded in half a day; the other half spent on light overdubs.
“Being in a studio had a focusing effect,” says Breen. “We knew that our time was limited and we prepared in a way that home recording doesn’t require. I think that gave us all a comfort with the songs that allowed for a looseness that Doug captured beautifully.”
Slow Planes (photo credit: Tim Breen)Two songs that thrive in this approach are the dub-infused instrumental, Static Actuator, and the fractured closing epic, Watershed. “I’m glad Static Actuator sounds that way because that’s the one song that I struggled with initially,” says Harding. “I knew what we were going for but it took some time to feel it.”
Christensen admits the song is the most fun to play. “It sounds like something off of Remain In Light to me,” he says. “All of the songs came together pretty quick.”
Like all their projects, Breen says that these songs afforded space for improvisation. “I think that helps the recording stay lively,” he explains. “We can still discover new space in the moment. Jamdek has a great vibe also and we played with a bunch of Doug’s gear and let the studio influence the sound.”
And that sound is the intensity of a live performance, which is exactly what the band capture. “There was some conversation about really old recording techniques we never really pursued but I think creating an environment was very specific,” says Breen. “It felt less like a series of songs and more like you wandered into an amphitheatre in the woods. I’m happy with how that was captured.”
Such as the strong nature of these recordings, a follow-up seems inevitable. “I’d love to, and I’d love for someone to release it on vinyl,” says Christensen. Breen agrees. “There are some areas of this sound I think we could expand on,” he says.
Having played a show before recording the album, it’s something the band wish to explore. And while Christensen admits to not being enthused about conventional venues, these songs deserve an audience. “Maybe in that aforementioned amphitheatre,” says Breen.
Harding parts with the final word, underlining what music is all about in 2026. Community and camaraderie, eclipsing all the other aspects of what has become an insidious industry drowned by social media self-promotion, PR campaigns and metrics. “Music aside, I just like hanging out with these guys.”
Good music. Good people. What’s not to love about In A Waterfall In A Wood?
In A Waterfall In A Wood is out now. Purchase from Bandcamp.
