Star Moles Turn Restraint Into Real Magic on 'Highway to Hell'
Emily Moales has been recording as Star Moles since she was a New Hampshire teenager with GarageBand and no audience, piling up around forty-four releases before most people’s first demo. Highway to Hell — album nine in the canon, cut with producer Kevin Basko (Rubber Band Gun) at the Historic New Jersey home studio in their shared Philly row house — is the record where a maximalist finally discovers the power of the empty space. Moales put it plainly: she didn’t feel the need to fill every space. The songs breathe like they’ve been waiting years for the room.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Basko keeps the foundation soft-focus and analog-warm — piano, acoustic guitar, and hand-drums doing the load-bearing work, ’70s folk-pop physics applied with a 2020s Bandcamp heart.
The Spatial Dynamics: The production is vast and spacious precisely because so little occupies it. When the saxophone and trumpet touches arrive, they land like guests, not furniture — and Jem Seidel’s percussion turns “Skip the Party” into the record’s one jaunty gatecrash.
Standout Performance
Moales’s voice, doing the least and winning the most. “Overdog” is the thesis: acrobatic wordplay and real vocal range, deployed with the observational wit of outlaw country and the wide-eyed mysticism of a fairytale — quietly devastating, intimately charming.
Why It’s Certified
Every DIY lifer eventually faces the choice: keep flooding the zone, or learn to edit. Highway to Hell is the sound of Emily Moales editing — stripped-back psychedelia where “Spinning” mourns like a dreamy country ballad and “Control Freak” turns a piano and a paradox into five of the year’s best minutes. Somewhere between Stephen Malkmus and Weyes Blood there’s a dirt road; Star Moles lives on it. Certified great.