Poet's Tooth

It all began with a bath. As Tele Novella’s Natalie Ribbons ran the water and listened to a guided meditation, she never anticipated arriving on the other side with an idea for an album, Poet’s Tooth. “I ended up sitting in that bath and going on quite a visualization journey,” says Ribbons, who resides in Lockhart, Texas, and performs in Tele Novella with Jason Chronis. “The images and feelings that came over me that night made me feel like I had a power that I had been ignoring and taking for granted for years. It was sad and happy at the same time,” Ribbons continues.

As Tele Novella, Chronis (who performs in the beloved and rekindled indie pop band Voxtrot) and Ribbons (who previously performed in the long-running “Victorian punk” project Agent Ribbons) have spent their past two albums creating “Medieval outsider country” on 2016’s House Of Souls and 2021’s Merlynn Belle. Poet’s Tooth – the band’s second album for Kill Rock Stars – steers the duo’s whimsical western-tinted quality into fascinating new directions: cinematic-pop balladry on the autoharp-tinged opener “Young & Free,” gently clip-clopping Americana-folk on “Hard-Hearted Way,” and bass-driven funk on the wry “Eggs In One Basket.” With help from producer Danny Reisch, Tele Novella have crafted their most genre-rich, poetic, and sincere album yet.

“This record delves into the more personal realm than Merlynn Belle,” Ribbons says. “I felt less playful and more urgently myself in a plainspoken way. There’s still occasional hints and wisps of our Medieval and Western aesthetic influences, but whatever elements of stylization are in place this time around, I think it just really sounds like us. There’s some deep sadness in some of these songs — something I don’t think I’ve ever fully let come out of me with my music. Despair, even. I’m strangely optimistic about sharing that side of things for once because I care about connection and resonance, and it offers more depth and context alongside songs that feel dreamier or grittier.”