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# Helen Linda's Head: Liz Harris's Shoegaze Band Returns Quieter
- URL: https://www.unknowndivide.com/helen-lindas-head/
- Published: 2026-10-06T12:49:51.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-06T21:23:54.000Z
- Description: Eleven years after The Original Faces, Liz Harris's band Helen returns with Linda's Head on Kranky: ten songs, 32 minutes, and a comeback that turns the volume down.
- Author: unknowndivide staff
- Tags: Music, #signal

Comeback records usually arrive louder than the band ever was. A group goes quiet for a decade, the members get older and better at their instruments, and the reunion album shows up overproduced and anxious to prove that the wait was worth it. [Linda's Head](https://grouper.bandcamp.com/album/lindas-head?ref=unknowndivide.com), the second album from Helen, does the opposite. The Pacific Northwest trio built around Liz Harris of Grouper has come back after eleven years with a record that is softer and stranger than its debut, and it came out on [Kranky](https://kranky.net/?ref=unknowndivide.com) on October 2.

[Linda's Head by Helen](https://grouper.bandcamp.com/album/lindas-head?ref=unknowndivide.com) 

Helen has always been the side of Harris that people forget to mention. Since 2005 she has released music as Grouper, and records like Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill in 2008 and the piano album Ruins in 2014 turned her into one of the most quietly influential artists in [ambient music](https://www.unknowndivide.com/ambient-music-starter-guide-essential-albums/). Helen was the band version: Harris on guitar and vocals, Scott Simmons of the Portland lo-fi group Eat Skull on bass, and Jed Bindeman of the psych band Eternal Tapestry on drums. Their only album, The Original Faces, landed on Kranky in 2015, and the press material claimed the group had started life as a thrash band.

That debut was a fuzzy, tape-warped take on shoegaze, closer to the distorted bliss of the records in our [shoegaze starter guide](https://www.unknowndivide.com/shoegaze-starter-guide-essential-albums/) than to anything Harris made alone. It also came with a small mystery. The backing vocals were credited to someone called "Helen," whose voice sounded uncannily like Harris's own, and nobody ever explained who she was. Early reviews guessed at an alter ego, a ghost or a Greek heroine and never settled on an answer.

The new album was announced on August 4 with two songs, the title track and "Dead Shark II," and it keeps the habit of hiding things in plain sight. Harris has suggested the title could refer to a fictional landform on the Oregon coast, where she spends most of her time. That fits a catalog full of names that point nowhere, from Helen herself to Nivhek, the alias that is almost "Kevin" spelled backwards and that she uses for her most impenetrable work.

What changed is the volume. The ten songs fit into about 32 minutes, and eight of them run about three minutes or less: "Faraway" opens the record in 69 seconds, while "Starline," "Linda's Head" and "black and quiet love" hover right around the two-minute mark. The weight sits in two long pieces. "darkblue" drifts for almost six minutes in the middle of the album, and "Canyon" closes it with eight and a half minutes of a circling bass line from Simmons under drumless, dimly lit guitar. [Willamette Week](https://www.wweek.com/music/2026/10/01/grouper-side-project-helen-is-back-after-10-years/?ref=unknowndivide.com) heard less blistering noise and more snowed-in bedroom pop, and that is the right way to hear it.

It would be easy to call that a retreat. The more interesting reading is that Helen has stopped trying to sound like a rock band at all. Bindeman and Simmons still give the songs weight and momentum, but the record behaves less like a set of tracks than like weather, with short songs drifting in and out of the two long drones the way fog moves across a beach. For a label that has spent three decades proving that [slow music can be radical](https://www.unknowndivide.com/kranky-records-starter-guide-essential-albums/), it is a very Kranky way to make a comeback.

Linda's Head is out now. Bandcamp lists the vinyl LP at $22, the CD at $15 and the digital album from $9, with physical orders shipped by Kranky. Harris has not released a new Grouper album since Shade in 2021, so for now this is the newest music she has, and it is worth the 32 minutes.

[Get Linda's Head on Bandcamp](https://grouper.bandcamp.com/album/lindas-head?ref=unknowndivide.com) · [More from Kranky](https://kranky.net/?ref=unknowndivide.com)

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