Anyone who has ever traveled through Texas and plowed through the endless cow pastures, which are not called grassy deserts for nothing, knows what wasteland is. Or, to put it positively: calming uneventfulness in front of an endless horizon with clouds piling up above it. And if you look closely, nothing is happening, but the blades of grass are shaking nervously in the constantly blowing wind.
Jana Horn claims that her new album, which is simply named after herself, was inspired by a year in New York, but it was recorded in a studio called Sonic Ranch in West Texas and sounds pretty much like the rolling grassland: the songs flow into one another, the mood changes in barely perceptible nuances, then a clarinet appears and shyly says hello without anyone really paying attention, the already anemic rhythm finally comes to a halt and sometimes the remaining notes simply disappear Nothing.
The appeal of Horn’s music lies in the fact that classic song structures are politely but very definitely declared null and void, and a new freedom arises from this. “I heard an apocalypse stir and wait, and ask: is this all there is?” asks the singer/songwriter in “Go On, Move Your Body”, whose song title may pass for sarcasm, but who needs verses and choruses when you can wallow so beautifully in melancholy?
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.