Now Only
An incredibly intimate, conversational folk memoir of grief. Recorded in the room where his wife passed, it balances heavy acoustic silence with sudden, raw distortion.
An incredibly intimate, conversational folk memoir of grief. Recorded in the room where his wife passed, it balances heavy acoustic silence with sudden, raw distortion.
Expansive companion
A cold room, the smell of old paper, and the dry scrape of nylon strings against a thumb. These songs sit right in the quiet space where someone used to be, interrupted by sudden, loud bursts of electric guitar that feel like a door slamming in an empty house. You are listening to a man talking to himself in the dark, trying to make sense of the laundry and the silence. It is heavy, plain, and devastatingly quiet.
These compositions stretch into a conversational exhaustion, relying heavily on a plainspoken spoken word delivery that feels less like a traditional performance and more like a weary, real-time reading of private journal entries.
Critics warmly received the album as a deeply moving and direct exploration of grief, praising the weight of its softly sung, memoir-like reflections on mortality. While some felt this follow-up was more downbeat and less impactful than its predecessor, most found the intimate journey to be a beautiful and deeply affecting experience.
“Mount Eerie follows the remarkable A Crow Looked at Me with a similarly styled album that will be of interest to Mount Eerie devotees but feels more downbeat and less necessary than its predecessor”Read review
“This offers some welcome encouragement that Elverum is going to make it through to the other side, which – for all the significant artistic achievements of his last two records – we are all surely rooting for him to do”Read review
“The expansive companion album to last year’s A Crow Looked At Me is no less a marvel. Phil Elverum’s latest is part memoir and part magnum opus, sung softly and with wonder”Read review
“Now Only is still as wrenching and direct as its predecessor, but concerns itself, at times, with the bitter truth that, sooner rather than later, he’ll be gone, too”Read review
“It’s part two of a painfully vivid window into the grieving process, and like part one, it’s brilliant”Read review
“Elverum’s voice’s masculinity-defying diffidence couldn’t be more indie, but his words now add all the weight he needs”Read review
“Phil Elverum’s last album focused unsparingly on his wife’s death, and a year later, the loss is still paralysing, though leavened with tiny moments of hope”Read review
“If you choose to look for the metaphors, there’s beauty and even redemption to be found in Now Only; if you don’t, there’s a kind of quiet acceptance in the numbness”Read review
“An emotionally nuanced meditation on death that is both heartbreaking and hopeful”Read review
“Elverum may spend the rest of his career grappling with his grief. It’s a tough, beautiful privilege to be invited along on that journey”Read review
“Although it is often an excruciating listen, it also finds room to step, however briefly, outside of the agony that marked its predecessor, if just for long enough to suggest that Elverum is, somehow, beginning to find some relief in the unbearable”Read review
“Like A Crow Looked at Me, Only Now overflows with love, but Elverum never romanticizes death”Read review
Cassette uses generative AI to enrich its catalog. How we use AI →
