IOWA

You could count the number of intelligible words across IOWA on your fingers if you wanted to. One of them is “January,” and another one is “snowstorm.” The new album from the Brooklyn-based artist Lia Ouyang Rusli, who records as OHYUNG, is both flush with the timbre of the human voice and almost completely empty of language. As OHYUNG’s first ambient album since 2022’s imagine naked!, IOWA joins a growing body of recent work—by more eaze, Lucy Liyou, even Ethel Cain on her more experimental ventures—that positions the voice not as an authoritative anchor at the center of a composition, but as a stray vapor trail daring listeners to draw meaning from its wisps.

Rusli, who lived in Iowa City from 2023 to 2024, wrote IOWA as an homage, or response, to Bruce Springsteen’s pivotal 1982 album Nebraska. The two records share a naming convention, a cover design, and an abundance of negative space: Springsteen’s sparse, tape-recorded LP let the flesh drop off his songs until they stood, skeletal, against an unbound and desolate landscape. Both records cast bleary eyes upon the American Midwest, but what a gesture it is to iterate upon Springsteen, a songwriter steeped waist-deep in poetry, with an album that declines to string more than a fistful of words together. If Nebraska hinged on its narratives, which were so rich and powerfully articulated that they inspired a book of short fiction, IOWA wades into the atmosphere left behind when all the ambivalent protagonists have been cleared from the stage. This chilling, starkly beautiful ambient piece draws Nebraska’s marginal whispers to the forefront and smears them across the picture plane.

OHYUNG’s most recent album, 2025’s You Are Always on My Mind, was nimble, direct, and genre-voracious, bridging alternative pop with uptempo (if askew) dance numbers. By contrast, IOWA is as glacial and unyielding as a long drive across the Great Plains. Many of its songs crystallize around samples of choirs singing, their soft syllables dissolving beneath heavy shrouds of reverb. Even severed from their context and mutated beyond recognition, these samples carry the gravity of sacred space, as if they were still reverberating beneath the impossibly high ceilings of the cathedrals in which they might have originally been sung.

The seriousness of these voices, and the traditions they embody, imbues IOWA with both a delicate beauty and a sense of dislocated menace. On “the black angel,” choral loops overlap and cascade in the background, some pitch-shifted to inhuman lows, while a pair of footsteps shuffles at the top of the mix. Somewhere behind thick walls, crowds congregate; right here, someone else walks alone. Synth washes mimic the liturgical timbre of the voices on “christofascism,” and then a great percussive crash punctuates their garbled phonemes, as if an urgent command has been imparted but could not possibly be understood.

Warmth and levity do flutter intermittently between these chilly stretches, as on “dancing parakeets,” whose synths effervesce in a pattern that recalls Laurie Spiegel’s digital reflections of the natural world. (Rusli’s pet parakeets came with her when she moved to Iowa from Bushwick, and the shimmer of this track gracefully renders the feeling of loving animals whose consciousness is both divergent from our own and immediately, intuitively familiar.) “driftless” scuttles inquisitively across an open snowfield, its tactile sounds moving with twitchy intelligence. With “kiara,” OHYUNG braids a choral loop into soft treble figures with such a light touch that the track extends a sense of welcome rather than foreboding. But these moments are lights winking in a vast and enveloping mist. The mood that prevails on IOWA is one of almost dissociative melancholy: that feeling that takes over when everything that’s happening to you outweighs the “you” to which it’s happening, when the intensity of the present moment sandblasts the scaffolding of memory that might be used to comprehend it.

IOWA concludes with “memorial,” a nearly 13-minute elegy for Chris Wiersema, a longstanding pillar of Iowa City’s independent music community who passed away in 2024. The song revolves slowly, casting loop against deepening loop, asking for the same careful quality of attention as William Basinski or Stars of the Lid. The sound breathes, oscillating between close instrumentation and wafting voices. It folds new sounds into its cycle each time it repeats, accreting texture and materiality as it goes. In this way it moves like grief: loping, cyclical, and in no hurry at all. Each year without the dead only deepens the furrow of their absence. But listen closely to the music: In the distance, birds are singing.