There’s a palpable feeling of intimacy throughout every moment of Radiator, the  debut album from Philadelphia’s Sadurn. The band’s spare-yet-satisfying  instrumentation, diary-like lyrics, and graceful vocal harmonies bring you in  extraordinarily close, breaking down any walls between artist and listener to offer  fleeting glimpses of life’s most internal moments—as well as one of the most  compelling debut records in some time. 

Sadurn started as the solo project of Genevieve DeGroot, who picked up the  guitar in 2015 in an effort to delve deeper into songwriting. “I came to the game  really late relative to most people,” DeGroot explains, “I didn’t start playing guitar  and really writing songs until after college. I’d always been a singer but I just felt  like I needed an instrument to really write songs on.” It wasn’t long until DeGroot  was creating the music that would eventually become Sadurn. “When you reach  into a new creative outlet, it’s really exciting because there’s just so much there. I  didn’t have this idea that I was going to go and become a musician, but I was  learning new chord progressions and writing, and I’d moved to Philly and was  surrounded by other songwriters.” One of these fellow musicians was guitarist  Jon Cox, who joined up with DeGroot to form an early incarnation of Sadurn. The  two started playing DIY shows in the city and released several homemade,  charmingly lo-fi EPs, then in early 2020, a chance experience kicked off the next  phase of Sadurn. “My friend Amelia [Swain] was just learning to play drums, we  started playing some of my songs together and it just made sense, we both had  this feeling that we had to do this.” The group was soon joined by Tabitha Ahnert  who had recently taken up bass, and Sadurn’s new lineup was complete.  

With new members and an evolving sound, the beginning of 2020 was meant to  be the four-piece’s debut, but the world had other plans. “I’d already been  scheming about making a record before the pandemic because I was excited  about the full-band songs,” says DeGroot. “We played one gig together and then  everything got put on hold for a while.” After months of isolation and waiting,  Sadurn figured out a way to push forward. “The only way we thought it could  work was if we isolated together for a couple weeks, so we found a cheap Airbnb  in the Poconos and our friend Heather Jones brought out all this recording gear.”  The band moved the furniture and created a makeshift recording studio, tucking  themselves away in close quarters, with only passing animals around to witness  the making of what would become their first full-length. “We didn’t even know if  we were going to do enough songs for an album at first, it was kind of a mystery  of what was going to work,” DeGroot explains. “The whole project up to that point  had been so lo-fi, so close to the source and unproduced. I wanted the band and 

the new recordings to still have that to some extent. We’re all so close and we  were living in this cabin for two weeks making this thing, I think it was sort of the  special circumstances that lent themselves to the way the album turned out.”  

That warmth and familiarity permeates Radiator, with its roomy recording and  lean instrumentation nimbly serving the songs, bolstering DeGroot’s stunning  vocals and conversational lyrics. Sadurn’s affecting indie folk draws on a range of  influences from Jason Molina, to Gillian Welch, to Alex G and Elliott Smith,  working in the tradition of songwriters whose melodies are as captivating as the  words within them. Radiator explores the struggles and eventual beauty of  grappling with multiple emotional realities, particularly when it comes to  relationships. “I definitely write as a way of processing what’s going on,” says  DeGroot. “I’m usually making space for a feeling or a thought that, for some  reason, I can’t talk to other people about because it’s too destructive.” 

Indecision, doubt, heartbreak, the idea of being forced to choose–these internal  conflicts are wrestled with throughout Radiator. Tracks like “snake,” the album’s  instantly powerful opener, and “golden arm,” an unhurried ballad that shows its  truest colors with time, are full of memorable moments and emotional detail.  Elsewhere “moses kill” tries to make sense of unresolved feelings around identity  and family overtop acoustic guitars recorded so closely that you can hear fingers  moving from fret to fret, while mid-album highlight “special power” is an  unabashed breakup song with a soaring chorus that belies its aching lyrics. “If  you’re having doubts about a relationship, there aren’t many places you can air  them,” DeGroot says. “Writing about that kind of thing is a way to wrap your mind  around them.”  

Radiator culminates in the penultimate song, “icepick”–a mix of gentle guitars, a  hazy drum loop, and DeGroot’s revealing lyrics that slowly tumbles into album  closer “<---.” This final track is a cascading reversed version of “icepick” that  plays almost like an instrumental plea to go back in time, armed with the  perspective and knowledge gained from a challenging experience. A sense of  daring-but-necessary honesty emerges as “<---” abruptly ends, and you start the  album over. True closeness isn’t always easy to achieve, but with Radiator,  Sadurn prove that it’s worth the risk.