The Ant Hill Kids – All Together Now!
Buffalo lofi-folk act The Ant Hill Kids have surfaced again with their second full-length album, All Together Now!, which officially saw the light of day back in March. This collection finds the group digging deeper into their unique “cult-folk” niche, a space where the unstructured spirit of freak folk meets the unhurried, reflective nature of slowcore. From the get-go, the album wraps you in a warm, fuzzy blanket of lo-fi production. It has that unmistakable, intimate feel of a passion project born in a bedroom or basement, where the raw edges are part of the charm. All Together Now! is our album of the week.
All Together Now! takes a noticeably moodier path than the band’s 2024 self-titled debut. The Ant Hill Kids embrace this darker vibe, building their songs around an instrumental core that feels both earthy and subtly inventive. Acoustic guitars pull double duty as the primary instrumentation and main storytellers. This groundwork is then colored with a variety of auxiliary percussion and the fascinating textures of sounds seemingly plucked from the everyday world. It’s easy to hear echoes of artists like Alex G, The American Analog Set, and a Horn of Plenty-era Grizzly Bear.
“Heavens To Betsy” kicks things off with a distinctively eerie, jangly, and slightly off-kilter feel, driven home by the unsettling line, “I have no mouth / and I must scream / I have no eyes / yet I must see.” The title track, “All Together Now!”, though short at just over a minute, serves as the album’s proper introduction, with the band announcing “The Ant Hill Kids! We’re All Together Now!” before giving way to layers of carefully picked guitars and a communal chant at the end. “Between Two Trees” emerges as a clear highlight, conjuring the delicate, somber acoustic beauty of Elliott Smith coupled with delightfully cryptic lyricism that is very on-brand for The Ant Hill Kids. “AHK 88.9,” while also fleeting, functions as an intriguing sonic sculpture, mimicking the experience of scanning an FM radio dial through a series of original Ant Hill Kids mini compositions and found sound snippets.
“Learning to Hunt” is another compelling moment, again built on those slowly arpeggiated acoustic chords, but this time with the added texture of fuzzy, lo-fi electric guitars droning along. The track unfolds like a disarmingly sincere love song, with lines such as “I’m learning to hunt for you” and “No one will care half as much as I care about you,” delivered with charming simplicity. The band also shows off their dynamic range with “Cour D’Alene Idaho.” The track starts in familiar Ant Hill Kids territory — organic, pared-back slowcore — but gradually blossoms into a sprawling, layered instrumental jam, bringing in synths and big, fuzzy guitar textures.
What The Ant Hill Kids achieve with All Together Now! is a potent exercise in atmosphere and narrative. They’ve crafted an album that speaks in hushed, cryptic tones but resonates deeply, using its lo-fi charm and varied song structures to paint the collection with an almost cinematic quality. Thoughtfully constructed, faintly unnerving, but ultimately captivating, All Together Now! is an all-around solid second effort from The Ant Hill Kids.
Categorised in: Album of the Week
This post was written by Ronald Walczyk