Palm Springs: songs that outrun the arrangements
Erica Dunn's first Palm Springs album in fifteen years, eight songs written and most of them played by her, better written than they are arranged.
BY JOLT Staff · AUG 28 2026 · 3 min readPalm Springs writes songs that could take a louder band, and Turning Yr Back on the Dolphin keeps them where the noise cannot reach. Eight songs, all written and most of them played by Erica Dunn, and not one of them is a skip. What the record lacks is the other thing: a setting that pushes back.
Dunn is a multi-instrumentalist who has spent years in Tropical Fuck Storm, the band that came out of the ashes of Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin's The Drones. That group's new album, Fairyland Codex, carries her song Bye Bye Snake Eyes. Palm Springs is the older project and the quieter one: No Hurt Like a Broken Heart in 2007, The Hope That Kills You in 2010, then fifteen years of silence under this name.
“There's not a bad song on this record: "Waiting for the Gate" is probably the highlight, but even the weakest track ("No Contest") is quite solid.”
It was recorded and mixed by Michael Beach and mastered by Mikey Young, released on Poison City Records and The Biscuit Tin, with the lacquer cut by Ruy Mariné, sleeve art by Ian Teeple and photography by Jamie Wdziekonski. The date was September 26, 2025. Dunn plays guitar, bass, piano and percussion herself and hands out the rest sparingly: Bradley Nguyen's cello, Isobel D'Çruz Barnes's flute, Tom Norton's harmonium. Three extra colours across eight songs, and they stay colours rather than becoming a band.
That restraint is the record's character and its main problem. Dunn is not a great singer and the record never pretends otherwise: she sings plainly, in the middle of her range, and lets the words do the load-bearing. It works where a song has somewhere to go. Elsewhere the arrangements sit between two stools, too full to feel like one person in a room, too thin to hit. The shape of a band keeps forming and never arrives.
"Waiting for the Gate" is the one that answers the doubt. It opens side two and it is the best thing here, a song with a spine and a long enough run to use it. "Lay Your Eric Burden Down" hangs its whole weight on a pun about Eric Burdon and shares nothing with The Animals beyond the name it bends, which is the joke, and it is a good one. "Your Ashes, My Tree" is the shortest cut on the record and the best titled. "No Contest" is the weakest, and the weakness is the record's own: the arrangement will not commit. It is still not a skip, which tells you how high the floor is.
The record closes on its title track, 5:25 and the longest of the eight. The comparison worth keeping is Townes Van Zandt, for the method rather than the sound: a writer who trusts a line and a few chords and does not decorate. Joni Mitchell is the other name within reach, and it does not hold, since Mitchell's records argue with their own arrangements and this one will not. It is for the listener who plays folk records in a kitchen and minds a missed note less than a lyric, who would rather have eight quiet songs than three loud ones. Coming from Tropical Fuck Storm and expecting that band's spill, you get the songs and not the spill.
Where it fails is in the finish, not the writing. "No Contest" is mixed tidy to a fault, and Dunn, who plays most of what is audible, is not a player who forces a moment. Admiration is the easy response; a shove is harder to find. Fifteen years between Palm Springs records is long enough to want a return with teeth, and this one keeps its hands in its pockets.
Still, the songs hold, and "Waiting for the Gate" alone makes the case for the return. 3.5. A good record from a better songwriter, and a reason to want the next one with a louder band in the room.
