Snocaps by Snocaps

My love for all things Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman knows no bounds. Snocaps is the name of a side project “supergroup” betweenn Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee), her twin sister Alison, and guitarist du jour MJ Lenderman. The three of them got together in 2025 and then surprise-released their self-titled debut on halloween. For me it was love at first listen.

The Crutchfield twins have a long history of performing together, starting when they were only 15 years old with their band The Ackleys. Three years later, in 2007, they formed a pop punk band, the feminist-centric P.S. Eliot, that caught some farther-ranging attention before disbanding in 2011. They had separate but equal musical drives, and needed to each find their own path to greatness.

Katie went on to become Bacon Review fave Waxahatchee, which you may remember hearing (and extensively read) at #2 in 2024 and #1 in 2020. Alison’s band, Swearin’, hasn’t hit my radar, but that may be because that band hasn’t released any music since 2018, before I really even started listening to either twin. Snocaps marks the first time the two have recorded music written by each of them together since P.S. Eliot broke up 15 years ago.¹

MJ Lenderman, whose own album was #9 in 2024, and who also featured prominently on the #2 album from Waxahatchee that year, is seemingly everywhere today. A fantastic guitarist, his work with Snocaps is no different. Although, when I saw the band perform these great songs together in December in LA, Lenderman chose to play the drums for all but one song in the set, letting the Crutchfield twins and others take over duties on the stringed instruments (watch them perform “Hide” live in LA on Dec 5).

The album is split down the middle, with each Crutchfield twin writing and singing lead on half the songs. Their voices and the tone of the band shifts between the two sister’s proclivities, with the Allison-led songs having a more upbeat, indie-rock, Rilo Kiley-esque vibe, and the Katie-led songs trending naturally towards the slower, twangier, alt-country Waxahatchee side. “Coast” (featured in the video above), is my favorite Alison-penned song from the album. The only other video the band has released from the album is for the Katie-penned song “I Don’t Want To.” It’s a great song, but not my favorite of hers on the album. That distinction goes to “Hide,” (watch my own handheld video of that song, linked at the end of the previous paragraph), a slow dirge of a song about openly questioning the love and dedication of a partner. The song reminds me so much of the 1988 song “Tugboat” by Galaxie 500, I often find myself playing one after the other on repeat.

The future of Snocaps is completely unknown. Supergroups like this (see boygenius, at #1 in 2023, for another example) are often one-offs. They capture an exciting moment in time, but with the alt-universe itch scratched, the superstars inevitably move back into their usual groove.

This album came out so quickly and surprisingly, the record industry was caught off guard (the vinyl for Snocaps isn’t even going to be ready to deliver until April, six months after the album was released digitally). Maybe that release will be the impetus of another, more wide-ranging tour for Snocaps later this summer. Lenderman and Waxahatchee are going on a 17-date co-headlining tour in April, but it’s not billed as a Snocaps tour. Surely we’ll hear some of these songs then? No idea if Alison will make an appearance, but here’s to hoping.

Given the familial relations of the twins, and the currently-close ties between Katie and Lenderman, I would be very surprised if this is the last we hear from the three of them together. But, if nothing else comes from Snocaps, we’ll have this phenomenal record to remember them by.

^{1. Allison and other Swearin’ band members have performed on some various Waxahatchee songs in the interim.↩}

__________________________________________

Subscribe to the Top 31 playlists!

Full Albums
All albums in their entirety

Radio Station
The best song pulled from each album

View all previous years’ Top 31s

Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee

I’ve never met Katie Crutchfield, but in the last year, I grew to feel as though I’ve known her for decades. Her intimate, earth shattering album, Saint Cloud, is the best album of 2020. The album, her fifth Waxahatchee release, came out on March 27, just as the world was closing in on us. In the latter half of March 2020, restaurants, bars, and music venues were shuttered, essential stores were constricted to an extremely limited capacity, and we were told to stay away from everyone outside of our immediate households for what we hoped would be just a couple of rough weeks, or a month, tops. Spring tours (including Waxahatchee’s, for which I had two tickets to excitedly see her perform here in Seattle on May 15), were postponed and rebooked for later in the year, and we all settled into our sweatpants behind our glowing screens to ride out the naively-expected-to-be-relatively-short isolation.

Unfortunately, weeks of lock-down turned into months, and then months turned into seasons. Public indoor spaces were opened prematurely and then closed again. And now here, at the end of January 2021, we’re coming up on a full year of life-saving isolation. To date, Covid-19 has taken over 400,000 people in the US alone, and that number is sadly expected to continue to grow by vast numbers by the time enough of us have been vaccinated. Many of those who have contracted the illness but survived will have long-term maladies caused by the original virus. And the healthy majority in the country, those who manage to get inoculated before ever coming into contact with Covid-19, will be left mostly physically fit but emotionally and socially (and educationally, for the younger set) stunted. Thus is the mental toll of this past year.

And while our mental health has suffered greatly, I can confidently say: having the warm embrace that is Saint Cloud available at the touch of a screen has made all of the insanity a bit more bearable. Beyond the album, Crutchfield, along with her beautiful voice, deft finger-picking, and infectious smile, has made many screen-based appearances in my family’s home this past year. A week before the release of the album, just as the lockdown was beginning, she and her boyfriend Kevin Morby (a fantastic indie-rocker as well) began hosting weekly Thursday-night Instagram livestreams, where they performed both Waxahatchee and Kevin Morby originals and numerous covers, and had guest stars dial in, such as Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes and Crutchfield’s musical twin sister, Allison. They produced a Tiny Desk Concert From Home for NPR, and Waxahatchee was the headliner for the virtual KEXPY Awards from KEXP this past December. These were poor substitutes for an in-person live performance, but having her hold our virtual hands through the darkness that was 2020 was so much better than having nothing at all.

I’m a relative newcomer to the magic of Waxahatchee, having only started listening around the release of her Great Thunder EP in 2018. Her fantastic 2017 record, Out in the Storm, only hit my radar once the year had ended, missing inclusion on that year’s Top 31. At the time of discovery, the well orchestrated and produced Storm was greatly outshined by the sparse, raw, guitar-and-voice only songs on the Thunder EP. The lead single, “Chapel of Pines,” is the kind of song I could listen to on repeat for days. It’s simple – only one verse and a repeated, single-line chorus — and direct, with Crutchfield pushing her voice to its limit, cracking, as if she’s struggling to stay afloat in the murkiness of the still waters around her.

She brings that same close-to-the-heart rawness to Saint Cloud. It only occurred to me earlier this week that, while the song structure is quite different, the powerful, guttural strain from her voice reminds me of Jeff Mangum on Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea (hands down my favorite album of all time), and that’s likely why I am so drawn to Saint Cloud. It’s real, it’s passionate, and it pulls me in like an inescapable magnetic field of emotion.

Listen to “Fire,” shown in the video above. It takes real chutzpah to belt a song like that right from the start, and I love it. Crutchfield’s lyrics, and the cadence of her rhymes, have always been great, but the crispness of the clip, the beauty in the beat of the words she chooses here feels otherworldly. To whit:

I take it for granted
If I could love you unconditionally I
could iron out the edges of the darkest sky
For some of us it ain’t enough
It ain’t enough

Breaking the second and third lines in the chorus in an unconventional way to have “I” and “sky” rhyme on the same 12th syllable is the kind of couplet that brings with it a pang of longing, a sadness that I can’t live in that chorus forever.

In 2018, Crutchfield recognized how her excessive drinking was not good for her or anyone around her, so she stopped. Essentially, she has been sober for the same length of time that I’ve loved her music, and I’m not so sure that’s a coincidence. Perhaps the clearness of thought is what allows her vocal and songwriting talents to really shine. In interviews, she’s said writing songs while sober has been more difficult for her. If we could only see the result that such a monumental life-shift might have on our creative output, that type of decision would be so much easier for each of us to make.

We are all better off because of the music and happiness Katie Crutchfield has shared with us throughout the last year. 2020 was the hardest year I’ve ever lived in so many ways, and it boggles the mind to consider how much of our future will be shaped by those 366 days. The final song on Saint Cloud, the title song, is a slow burner, very similar to the much-beloved “Chapel of Pines” I mentioned earlier. The song’s true meaning is obtuse, but that final stanza, “And when when I go, when I go, look back at me, embers aglow” might be how I look back at 2020. Crutchfield has a slight yodel she throws in her songs when she really wants to lay on the feelings. Those final “when I go”s get that extra oomph, and it adds a little flair of perspective to my vision of 2020, one that‘s not so bad.

I have truly loved the time I’ve been gifted this past year to spend with those closest to me — my wife and our two lovely children. But with that extra time has come a greater mental social cost that we have yet to recognize or quantify. We’ve been in a collective cocoon, and 2021 is when the world slowly breaks free and starts to spread its new wings. When we were deep in it last year, every day seemed to bring some new tragic headline, another horrifying fact or secret realization brought to light. Now, a month into 2021, I have a newly-lit hope that the perspective wrought by the year will ultimately drive positive, lasting, unbreakable change. I once was blind, but now I see. Let’s work together to do great things with our new eyes.

__________________________________________

1. Saint Cloud by Waxahatchee
2. Fetch The Bolt Cutters by Fiona Apple
3. Punisher by Phoebe Bridgers
4. folklore + evermore by Taylor Swift
5. Untitled (Black Is) + Untitled (Rise) by Sault
6. RTJ4 by Run The Jewels
7. Shore by Fleet Foxes
8. Serpentine Prison by Matt Berninger
9. The Ascension by Sufjan Stevens
10. Making a Door Less Open by Car Seat Headrest
11. Dreamland by Glass Animals
12. A Hero’s Death by Fontaines D.C.
13. Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez by Gorillaz
14. Mordechai + Texas Sun EP by Khruangbin
15. Introduction, Presence by Nation of Language
16. Free Love by Sylvan Esso
17. Miss Anthropocene by Grimes
18. 3.15.20 by Childish Gambino
19. Women In Music Pt. III by HAIM
20. The Third Mind by The Third Mind
21. Superstar by Caroline Rose
22. Impossible Weight by Deep Sea Diver
23. We Will Always Love You by The Avalanches
24. Ultra Mono by IDLES
25. Visions of Bodies Being Burned by clipping.
26. Thin Mind by Wolf Parade
27. The Loves of Your Life by Hamilton Leithauser
28. Palo Alto (Live) by Thelonious Monk
29. color theory by Soccer Mommy
30. Fall to Pieces by Tricky
31. Quarantine Casanova by Chromeo

Subscribe to the 2020 Bacon Top 31 playlist: Apple Music / Spotify
All Top 31s

#6 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Snocaps

#1 on the 2020 Bacon Top 31 — Waxahatchee