runo plum - Star Tee

On patching, runo plum isn’t just healing, she’s transforming. The intimate debut LP from the Minnesota-based singer and songwriter gracefully captures the contraction, expansion and release of an intense period of emotional repair, in soft-edged, radiating indie rock. Inspired by a breakup and subsequent healing process, patching is a sonic journey as much as an emotional one. Whether it be longing for friendship, social anxiety, hypochondria spirals, or coming home to a box of stuff from your ex, the album oscillates from rumination to little glimmers of joy to closure and eventually, falling in love all over again. 

Each song on patching shifts and prods the same tender center, deftly working to soothe and mend the aches of lost love and anxiety. It’s those gentle moments of reckoning and renewal that form the throughline of patching, with runo’s warm voice and candid lyricism at the helm, acting as a kind of homegrown salve. In these moments of healing comes a crystalline clarity–that patching oneself isn’t only about fixing something–it’s a catalysing act of creation, not so different from the genesis of runo’s painted butterfly on the album’s cover. 

Unbridled sincerity isn’t anything new for runo plum, who’s been writing and quietly sharing bedroom dispatches of her intricate folk for a half-decade. During the pandemic years, she steadily caught the ears of a widening circle of listeners and soon began independently releasing a series of singles and EPs, all while cutting her teeth on the live side supporting Searows, Angel Olsen and Hovvdy. 

In the midst of this wave of success came an unexpected heartbreak, and making a record wasn’t exactly top of mind. It wasn’t until runo had written a mass of songs in a five-month burst of intense creativity following that chasm that she realized that not one, but two, records were forming. “I was writing like I never had before and everything felt more meaningful than ever,” she says. When she wasn’t writing, she was painting, hunting for knick-knacks at local thrift shops and spending her days in the woods, admiring the spring and summer bloom–all aspects of her life that imbue her music with a sort of homespun charm. In those verdant months, runo demoed patching and sent around the early recordings, eventually signing on with LA-based record label Winspear (Slow Pulp, Wishy, Teethe). 

In a process enlivened by synchronicities, growth and full circle moments, runo set out to record patching, bringing a handful of new collaborators into the fold and mixing studio-captured performances with bedroom vocal overdubs that harken an earlier era of runo’s music. Lutalo, the Minnesota-born, Vermont-based musician and producer fresh off the release of their acclaimed debut The Academy, signed on to produce the album after meeting runo almost a decade ago. An early collaboration between the two sparked the lyrical core of runo’s 2021 single “yin to yang,” and bringing Lutalo onto the project marked another moment of alignment and natural expansion for runo. 

Together with collaborator, instrumentalist and girlfriend Noa Francis, runo and Lutalo recorded the album in a cabin in rural Vermont over the course of two weeks. Centering the honeyed, time-worn timbre of a centenarian acoustic guitar and the easeful warmth of runo’s voice, the trio began putting together the pieces one by one. “It was just flowing,” runo says. “Every song is an emotional fragment during my healing process patched together into one project, while I was also patching myself together in real time. You can feel the damage, but also the repair. The slowing down in order to move forward, and the dreaming of a time where I’m finally free from the dread.”

On patching, the work of metamorphosis plays as large of a role as the studied process of mending and repair. Across its twelve tracks, runo paints her melodic arcs with a sharp sense of dynamics, crafting songs that capture both the hazy highs and the dark blue lows of all the natural cycles that make the world turn. At the heart of her writing lies a sort of ephemeral magic, one born from her ability to alchemize a deeply formative chapter of life into a vivid scrapbook of songs, capturing the contours of her experiences in shimmering detail. 

Buoyed by a conversational, propulsive melody, album opener “Sickness” deals in unhealthy cycles and mundanity. Underbellied by anxiety, it soars and sears, piecing day to day tableaus together with runo’s knack for introspection. Through the lush, strummy daze of “Lemon Garland,” runo works up an antidote to her malaise, conjuring a daydream of community and companionship filled out with finely layered vocals and the spacious resonance of a 12-string guitar. “Halfway Up The Lawn” recounts the messy and deeply human desperation phase of a breakup, unraveling all of the yearning and mental hang-ups over persistent, near-hypnotic instrumentation. “I don’t wanna watch you turn green, but I will” she sings, toying with acceptance, but not entirely giving up the fight. 

If the earlier tracks are the daytime, then tracks like “Elephant” and “Locket” comprise the night, or the fertile darkness of the caterpillar in its chrysalis. The sweet sparseness of “Alley Cat” spins out into a whirl of social anxiety with a swoon-worthy twang, unfolding into an outro that suspends the listener in the fluttering sheen of runo’s upper register. “Quiet One” narrows in on runo’s diffuse vulnerability, while “Be Gentle With Me” details the double edged sword of new love in an aching, indie rock freefall with the same unabashed candor of early Julia Jacklin and Big Thief records.

In the reverberating billow of “Gathering the Pieces,” runo circles the tender emotional core of the record, singing its titular lyric burdened by her unease–“gathering the pieces of what I have left from before / time to get patching / it seems that I came up short.” A little despondent, runo gets philosophical, asking “will the emptiness always be empty? / will the loneliness always be pending?” as the instrumentation swells to fill the void. 

Put simply, that’s what patching does: It swells to fill the void. A lush debut statement born from precarity and uncertainty, patching is filled with these artful flips—rich sonic moments to balance out emotional vacancies, creating expansion from an ending. It’s only the first few pages in the new chapter of what’s to come from runo plum, whose burgeoning voice as a performer and songwriter are sure to flourish as she enters this expansive new chapter, continuing to examine heartache and renewal with her lucid pen and tender heart.