Spiria – Amateur’s Garden
Listening to Amateur’s Garden, the second album from Buffalo’s art pop duo Spiria *, feels like stepping into a secret world. It’s a space that’s both carefully tended to and wonderfully overgrown. You can tell that siblings Mikayla and Johnny Manke spent a lot of time with these songs, having written them over a few years before recording them in the summer of 2024. The result is an album that doesn’t rush – one that builds intricate, personal worlds and is more concerned with texture and feeling than easy hooks. It’s an invitation to get lost for a while, and its our album of the week.
The duo officially formed Spiria in 2022 after a lifetime of musical bonding. Their sound is built around the interplay between Mikayla’s piano and passionate, introspective vocals, and Johnny’s dynamic, expressive drumming. They move freely between ethereal, ambient textures and jazzy, experimental passages, with production value sitting right up front, highlighting the piano/vocal/drum core. On Amateur’s Garden, they are joined by a handful of musicians on strings and trumpet, who help flesh out their already colorful arrangements.
Spiria makes a bold statement right out of the gate with “The Dam,” a seven-and-a-half-minute opener that asks for – and earns – your undivided attention. It begins quietly, almost fragile, with just Mikayla’s voice and piano before it swells into something huge. Johnny’s drumming here is more like a conversation than a rhythm section, helping to shape the song’s emotional arc. The opener has the fearless, theatrical quality of an artist like Kate Bush, and it makes clear that Spiria is comfortable taking their time to build something special.
That feeling of patient growth is all over the album. A song like “Perpetual” starts out with a simple, beautiful piano line and vocal, but slowly blooms into a full-band celebration that ends with the raw joy of people yelling and shouting, like kids dancing around a fire. The single, “Pictures In My Head,” really captures the essence of the whole record. It weaves in the sounds of a summer night while the core of piano, drums, and vocals drift and explore, held together by the sad, beautiful sound of guest strings.
One of the biggest surprises comes right in the middle with the instrumental title track. Instead of the piano that leads so many of the other songs, “Amateur’s Garden” is built from layers of strummed instruments that weave in and out of each other without any percussion. It’s incredibly immersive and brings to mind the dense, joyful sound of Animal Collective’s album Feels. That willingness to play with different sounds pops up again on “The Only Way,” which brings in trumpet, cello, and violin for a track with a gorgeous, jazzy edge, highlighted by reflective lyrics like, “oh, to live in the canvas I’m wrecking.”
For all its complex layers, some of the album’s strongest moments are its most direct. “Dissolve” is a definite standout, led by an acoustic guitar and a heartfelt vocal melody that should connect with anyone who loves Phoebe Bridgers. The song understands the power of holding back; its minimal percussion makes the emotional weight hit that much harder. The album closes on a similarly intimate note with “Seed,” which highlights some of Mikayla’s most impressive piano work. The song’s delicate fade-out conjures up that same sense of quiet intimacy that permeates the rest of the album. Amateur’s Garden is a beautifully patient record, a sprawling, heartfelt world that’s well worth getting lost in.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ronald Walczyk