The Sleeves - The Sleeves

Jack Cooper and Tara Cunningham, both known as one half of Modern Nature, step into their own with this fully realized self-titled debut. Following an all-instrumental Mossy Tapes release, the duo have recorded ten new songs that showcase their vocal and guitar interplay in ways that feel like a genuine leap forward, bearing only the faintest echoes of anything they have done before, individually or collectively.

What The Sleeves do with the guitar and vocal duo format is quietly radical. This is not a record built on studied minimalism or the romance of empty space, it is something simultaneously expansive and incandescent, two voices and two guitars finding a chemistry that is rare and immediately recognizable as something worth paying close attention to. The songs are fully formed and deliberate, a world away from the largely improvised nature of their earlier work together.

Records that achieve this particular balance do not come along nearly often enough. The Sleeves is one of them.