WENDY EISENBERG has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser, and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk. On catalog highlights including 2020’s Auto and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler Viewfinder, they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy’s self-titled new album (Joyful Noise) comprise their most certain vision yet.

These songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts - where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory - and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half".