Hiding Places – The Secret to Good Living
Never let it be said that slowcore doesn’t have riffs. In its heyday, double-digit BPMs weren’t a hindrance for bands who still had a yen for tearing up a fretboard. Low’s “Dinosaur Act” proved that open space could be as heavy as the notes themselves, while Idaho tapped into the live-wire rust of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse on “Pomegranate Bleeding.” And Codeine’s “Cigarette Machine” reveals itself as an unusually nasty piece of music between its open chords and deeper breaths. Slower isn’t always less; dropping the tempo sometimes just means giving each note a chance to reverberate a little longer.
The Secret to Good Living, the debut album by Brooklyn-based Georgia-and-North Carolina transplants Hiding Places, embodies this duality as strong as any album since slowcore’s crest in the mid-’90s. More than half the duration of its leadoff track, “Dead Dove (Your Love Was Never A Waste of Time)”, lingers in a sort of agitated stillness, Audrey Keelin repeating the line “Your love was never a waste of time” to let a feeling hang in the air, savoring the sweetness rather than letting grief consume it. But the road to that bittersweet climax is laden with hammer-ons and pull-offs, harmonics and power chords—a blazing path of dirty and distorted glory.
Hiding Places maintain a stunning tension between gentle, at-times whisper-quiet sparseness and roaring, infectious leads. Where a band like Wednesday dial up the volume on the kind of country-rock that Magnolia Electric Co. made their signature, Hiding Places take a similar tack with the haunted lullabies of Songs: Ohia, which is most apparent on a glorious standout like “One Hand.” Lightning strikes of eerie organ drone punctuate verses of spindly 6/8 acoustic riffs played by Keelin, Nicholas Byrne and Michael Matlin in a three-part progression. Against accents of prickly electric licks, Keelin describes a self-imposed loneliness through patiently sung confessions of “I took too long to write for some reason.” Lightning strikes again with Nicholas Byrne’s guitar solo, aching and abrasive, a cathartic climax before a false ending, its glorious verse returning just long enough for Keelin to salt the wound: “You took too long.”
An album like The Secret to Good Living benefits from a good set of headphones, some of its most subtly beautiful moments demanding a closer listen, whether through the somber waltz of “Ballad No. ∞,” the vast spaces between minor-key strums on “Heat Lightning,” or the low rumble between the Mascis-on-sedatives squalls of “Holy Roller.” But even a slight dialing up of their grungier tendencies can leave that much more of an impact, as with the beautifully ragged “Waiting,” wherein Byrne anticipates loss as it slowly emerges over the horizon: “Waiting was the hardest thing/You took pride in everything/Waiting for my heart to break/You were right and I was late.” The tension between moments in which The Secret to Good Living is at its stormiest or most still is always impeccably balanced, the band’s collaborative songwriting and knack for pacing yielding songs that contain a beautifully complex tangle of moods and emotions. Hiding Places never waste a moment—but they never let it pass too quickly either.
Label: Keeled Scales
Year: 2026
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Hiding Places : The Secret to Good Living
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