We can’t review every release that stops us in our tracks here on KLOF, but when one lands that deserves your attention, we try to give it some presence. North Carolina-based Sluice drop their new album, Companion, on Friday — and this one really should be on your radar. I’m chalking this one up as a personal recommendation – Here’s the low-down.
There’s a moment on Sluice’s new album, Companion, where frontman Justin Morris sings about being a kid reading in a bunk on a tour bus, crying and asking “what happened to it all feeling so good?” It’s a question that drove him out of music entirely — and, eventually, back into it on very different terms.
The Durham, North Carolina quartet — Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle — release Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut, on March 27th. It follows 2023’s Radial Gate, the album Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking songs at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s while working carpentry jobs.
KLOF readers will recognise several names here. Rodenbough, also known for her work as a vocalist and fiddler in folk quartet Mipso, released the searing Between the Blades in 2023. And Child-Lanning, Morris and Rodenbough all feature prominently in the collective Weirs, whose exceptional Diamond Grove we reviewed last year.
Morris’s path to Companion has been anything but straightforward. He moved to New York in 2019, not to chase the dream but to abandon it. A stint selling merch on tour had shown him the job-like side of indie rock, and the gap between the fantasy and reality left him disillusioned. Then, less than a day into his Bushwick sublet, he was robbed at gunpoint. Unable to make sense of anything except through song, he started writing again.
Recorded with producer Alli Rogers at Betty’s in the winter of 2024 and tended over two years, Companion sounds like someone deciding there may yet be a dream worth struggling for. Vegas returns to Morris’s time on tour, watching the indie machine from the loading dock and feeling overwhelmed, before landing on a full-circle moment when he’s playing the 40 Watt with old friends. Songs like Torpor and WTF reach back to the robbery and spiritual whiplash of that period, now re-recorded after years of live performance to show how time can transform crisis into determination.
But Companion is also a love album, shaped by the big-sky choruses of country music. The titular companion shifts shape throughout: sometimes a partner, sometimes a dog slipping out the door, sometimes Morris catching his own reflection. At the album’s spiritual centre sits Unknowing, a sludgy eight-minute vocoder piece built on a prayer by Trappist monk Thomas Merton about faith without certainty. Morris never lets you forget the other possible life tugging at his sleeve — ratchet straps, pressure-treated lumber, contractor licences — but the album frames that labour alongside the labour of music itself.
“I think about being very wrong,” Morris confesses on Overhead. It’s the kind of line that holds the whole album together: a reckoning with expectation, and a quiet insistence that companionship — in love, in community, in music — is worth the struggle. It’s a theme we saw running through Weirs’ Diamond Grove too — and with three of Sluice’s members also part of that collective, it’s clearly more than a coincidence.
Pre-Order via Bandcamp: https://sluice.bandcamp.com/album/companion