Nom De Plume return with their third studio album, Circle The Dream, a work that feels both expansive and intimate, a collection that stretches from quiet confessions to sky-wide horizons. Fronted by singer-songwriter and guitarist Aris Karabelas, with bassist Michael Magee anchoring the band’s restless explorations, the Maryland-and-Wyoming outfit continues to blur the lines between folk, alt-country, and indie rock, while weaving dreamlike textures.
The title track, Circle The Dream, sits at the heart of the record. It is built on acoustic guitar and sweeping violin lines, carrying a sense of reckoning and release; a meditation on hopes and the cycles of becoming. Where that song expands with grandeur, While My Eyes Gently Weep moves in the opposite direction: sparse, aching, and deeply vulnerable, it opens the door to the record’s most fragile spaces.
Fly introduces a soaring tension, where pedal steel bends toward the ethereal, and subtle dissonances shadow the yearning for transcendence. By contrast, The Shadow carries an experimental weight; haunted tones and layered atmospheres that refuse to resolve easily, leaving listeners with a haunting residue. Elsewhere, Once A Time Of May glimmers with memory and melancholy, sounding like a story half-remembered, while Lazy provides a moment of lightness, slowing the pace to honor stillness and small joys.
Circle The Dream is remarkable in the way it shifts between tenderness and boldness without breaking its emotional thread. Songs like We’re All Like That pull the focus outward, offering a raw, compassionate reminder of shared humanity, while Do Like I Told You and Daylight close the arc with urgency and release; the former insistent, almost hypnotic, the latter radiant with forward-looking hope.
Across the record, Nom De Plume demonstrate their gift for sculpting soundscapes that feel lived-in, carrying both the intimacy of diary entries and the vastness of open skies. It is an album of resilience and vulnerability, of uncertainty and transcendence; a journey that circles back not to where it began, but somewhere entirely new.
