Biography
The hushed, meditative soundscapes of Lean Year arise from the partnership of vocalist Emilie Rex and filmmaker/musician Rick Alverson, whose sparse scoring draws on both conventional rock instrumentation and orchestral colors. Their first full-length album, Lean Year, appeared in 2017, while the 2022 successor Sides reunited Alverson with co-producer Erik Hall of In Tall Buildings.
Alverson first surfaced on the wider indie landscape in the 1990s at the helm of Drunk, a band steeped in the atmospheres of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Beginning with To Corner Wounds in 1997, the group placed four albums on Jagjaguwar. Parallel to that endeavor, his Spokane project debuted with Leisure and Other Songs in 2000, layering guitar and drums alongside piano, strings, and mallet percussion; Jagjaguwar continued to issue Spokane recordings through the following decade. Alverson stepped behind the camera for his first feature, The Builder, in 2010, co-writing the script with Colm O’Leary. The same pair next collaborated on New Jerusalem in 2011 and The Comedy in 2012, both directed by Alverson. His fourth film, Entertainment, arrived in 2015 with a screenplay credited to Tim Heidecker and lead actor Gregg Turkington, known as Neil Hamburger; the cast also featured John C. Reilly and Michael Cera. During the same period he helmed videos for Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Oneohtrix Point Never.
In the mid-2010s Emilie Rex resigned from her post at Indiana University and left the Midwest for Alverson’s longtime home of Richmond, Virginia. The pair soon launched Lean Year, Rex’s gentle, melancholy delivery providing an ideal counterpart to Alverson’s quietly cinematic arrangements. Western Michigan-based Erik Hall supplied the third essential thread of the duo’s spacious, haunting aesthetic, co-producing the self-titled debut with Alverson. After the project signed to Western Vinyl—the same label that houses In Tall Buildings—the album reached stores in October 2017. Hall returned to co-produce and perform on the follow-up, Sides, issued in September 2022. Shaped in part by the deaths of several close relatives, the record also incorporated contributions from Elliot Bergman of NOMO and Wild Belle, Joseph Shabason of Destroyer and the War on Drugs, and Matthew O’Connell of Chorusing.
Alverson first surfaced on the wider indie landscape in the 1990s at the helm of Drunk, a band steeped in the atmospheres of Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Beginning with To Corner Wounds in 1997, the group placed four albums on Jagjaguwar. Parallel to that endeavor, his Spokane project debuted with Leisure and Other Songs in 2000, layering guitar and drums alongside piano, strings, and mallet percussion; Jagjaguwar continued to issue Spokane recordings through the following decade. Alverson stepped behind the camera for his first feature, The Builder, in 2010, co-writing the script with Colm O’Leary. The same pair next collaborated on New Jerusalem in 2011 and The Comedy in 2012, both directed by Alverson. His fourth film, Entertainment, arrived in 2015 with a screenplay credited to Tim Heidecker and lead actor Gregg Turkington, known as Neil Hamburger; the cast also featured John C. Reilly and Michael Cera. During the same period he helmed videos for Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and Oneohtrix Point Never.
In the mid-2010s Emilie Rex resigned from her post at Indiana University and left the Midwest for Alverson’s longtime home of Richmond, Virginia. The pair soon launched Lean Year, Rex’s gentle, melancholy delivery providing an ideal counterpart to Alverson’s quietly cinematic arrangements. Western Michigan-based Erik Hall supplied the third essential thread of the duo’s spacious, haunting aesthetic, co-producing the self-titled debut with Alverson. After the project signed to Western Vinyl—the same label that houses In Tall Buildings—the album reached stores in October 2017. Hall returned to co-produce and perform on the follow-up, Sides, issued in September 2022. Shaped in part by the deaths of several close relatives, the record also incorporated contributions from Elliot Bergman of NOMO and Wild Belle, Joseph Shabason of Destroyer and the War on Drugs, and Matthew O’Connell of Chorusing.
Albums
Singles
