The Anti-Folk Fixture Reclaims His Voice With Heartbreak, Humour, And Hard-Won Light
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BLOCK has always belonged to the kind of New York songcraft that prefers cracked sidewalks to polished marble. On Love Crash, his first new album in 13 years, that instinct feels sharpened, not dulled. The record lands like a late-night confession scrawled on the back of a receipt: intimate, funny, bruised, and still somehow smiling through the ache.
Across 10 tracks, BLOCK turns heartbreak and loss into something strangely buoyant. His voice carries the lived-in edge of anti-folk, but the writing reaches wider, folding in the melodic snap and off-kilter charm that made his earlier work such a quiet force. There’s a sense of motion here, of someone pulling himself up rung by rung. Cracked open and not sleeping, I reached for the guitar
, he says. In retrospect, each song ended up being the rung of a ladder that led me out of a very dark place. It was a rich vein of heartbreak to mine, and I made it out—but, just barely.
That hard-won clarity gives Love Crash its charge. Produced by Chris Kuffner and mixed and mastered by Blake Morgan, the album sounds carefully lived-in rather than overworked, letting the emotional grain of the songs stay visible. The early singles I Thought I Won The War
, Over And Over
, and Firefly
hinted at the record’s range: hooks that stick, lyrics that sting, and a wit that keeps the whole thing from sinking under its own weight.
BLOCK’s comeback has also carried the weight of a scene’s memory. He came up as part of the late-’90s anti-folk wave, alongside artists who treated fragility, sarcasm, and sweetness as tools rather than opposites. That lineage still hums through Love Crash, but the album feels less like a revival than a recalibration. He sounds older, yes, but also freer, with the kind of perspective that only arrives after distance, damage, and a long enough silence to hear yourself again.
I’ve reclaimed lost parts of myself while reaching a whole new audience along the way
, he says, and the album bears that out. Love Crash is a return, but it’s also a reckoning: with memory, with survival, with the odd, stubborn joy of still being here.
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