Wind Inside by Half Shadow

releases March 6, 2026

Recorded by Jesse Carsten Summer 2024 at the House of Plenty More in Portland, Ore.

Mastered by Skyler Pia.



WIND INSIDE

Appearing courtesy of Portland’s Antiquated Future Records in early 2026, Half Shadow’s newest offering—an EP of four concise, dream-lit songs—opens with these soft, chanted phrases: “call me back behind your whispering curtain / just for the hour’s golden phase / I want to watch your hands divine the fretboard / coaxing penumbras from their hiding place.” Sung over echoing guitar, glittering piano, and a chorale of silvery voices, we’re quietly beckoned into a veiled space, brimming with desire, grief, and a hard-won, wind-bitten transcendence. Wind Inside bears these contrasts luminously, ripening with songs of mystery, longing, and the cyclical churn of time.

Like bright canticles plucked from the dark hours, these tunes—hanging somewhere between gentle, experimental folk, and an ecstatic rock and roll—are at once searching, finger-picked poems, and bare-skinned declarations of personal growth. “This too shall bear fruit / but until then, just as you said / we must all learn to bear the fallow field,” intones Jesse Carsten—Half Shadow’s sole songwriter/producer—on the song “Fruit.” This sung poem details a winter of coping through mental illness, crouching by the “hearth aglow,” to envision the return of light, self-love and the warm trance of Spring. Intimate images of real life process, and the archetypal poetry of loss, are woven throughout. We witness a lover leaving in pained, twilight haste, disappearing into a dreamlike darkness; or an adored, uncaring face turned away, dithered in deserts of time. There is a sense of deep estrangement and doubt here, but also rebirth, and the rising out of personal underworlds. A bright red juice seeping from the springtide berry.

Wind here is both the soft, consoling breeze, as well as a powerful awakening force that compels us to witness “something unkillable,” in nature that “unfurls its simple grandeur, its good life.” These songs convey how we too are as beautiful, broken, and formidable as landscape, exquisitely barren, and infinitely fecund. Wind Inside, though brief, thunders with this level of depth and wonder, urging listeners into a range of elemental emotionality that’s remained Half Shadow’s enduring poetic trademark for the past thirteen years. With no song breaking the three minute mark, this cohesive assemblage of wind-music begs for repeat listens, and, as Half Shadow’s first seven inch record, continued whirls on the turntable across the seasons.