Curbside Lambsear: Put Rings on All My Fingers to Weigh Down My Hands EP

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Genre:

Rock

Label:

Scenic Route

Release Date:

2026

Curbside Lambsear means nothing. As a band name, it’s drawn from a photo Magdalena McLean posted on Instagram a few years ago—of a lamb’s-ear plant that was growing next to a curb—and does not really necessitate interrogation. But wow, what a phrase to say out loud! There’s no band I’d rather speak the name of right now: Those consonant clusters give the tongue a real workout, bring back Proustian memories of spelling bees and schoolyard riddles.

When I say Curbside Lambsear are wordy, I don’t mean in a literal sense. Maybe I’d describe them as wordsy: as in, headsy about words. Just listen to the title of their debut EP: Put Rings on All My Fingers to Weigh Down My Hands. The construction practically encourages you to swing it as you say it out loud: Put Rings on-All-My Fingers to Weigh Down My Hands. McLean and her bandmate Annabelle Mödlinger say they write lyrics together, phrase by phrase, meaning their songs don’t contain full narratives; what they lack in discrete stories they more than make up for in structural beauty. When one of them intones that “No ordinary word makes the world fit right into the palms of me/No ordinary word makes the world makes the world makes the world,” I have no idea what they might be referring to—but it’s easy to lurch into the pessimistic beauty of the whole thing.

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Viola player McLean and synth player Mödlinger were both born in Austria, but became friends in London as members of sparky art-rock band the Umlauts. McLean also performs in Caroline as a violinist and co-vocalist, and an understanding of that band is helpful in parsing the aesthetic world of Curbside Lambsear, which similarly manages to blend elements of drone and noise into a world that still feels pretty and pastoral.

Most frequently, Curbside Lambsear’s music recalls the work of Tirzah and Mica Levi in its willingness to find grooves in harsh environs (as on “Avril”) or to contrast sweet, almost childlike vocal takes with dubby, decaying production (“Uneasy”). Caroline’s Jasper Llewellyn drums on four out of the EP’s five songs, adding tense, leaden improvised-sounding percussion to “Jjochstubn” and aggressive, dissonant cymbal to “Avril” that pull Rings away from the realm of NTS-core pastoral pop and into harsher, more full-throated territory. The overall effect is heady and hypnotic—a set of songs that tickle the back wall of your stomach and the soles of your feet thanks to their dense, churning environments.

And then there are the lyrics, which most often function, like McLean and Mödlinger’s instruments, as rhythmic and textural elements. On “Uneasy,” the song’s sole couplet—“On the off chance it’s true I’m uneasy like you/While the beat softly shatters some things just don’t matter”—gives the song a rhythmic framework when it could otherwise fade into ambient mush. On “Avril,” they repeat the line “Funny I’m that,” and it feels like a lifeline among relentless industrial noise, even as the words quickly begin to feel like disembodied sounds. This is hardly throwaway lyricism, of course—it’s just that the words themselves don’t matter as much as how they’re being delivered and how they’re interacting with the rest of the music.

Because although each individual element of a Curbside Lambsear song is very distinctive—caterwauling viola, swaggy 404 beat, unassumingly threatening vocal line—the music doesn’t particularly befit calling them out individually. When I listen to “Avril,” I think only of its aggro, chin-forward swagger; “No Ordinary Word” feels practically diegetic, the way its percussive elements spring forth at random and then pull back. Such is this music’s genius. It’s literal—curbside lamb’s-ear—and far greater than the sum of its parts: Curbside Lambsear.

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