The first strum on patching tells you that we’re deep in the mountains, far from the rush of anything with nothing but the woods and the weather for company. This is astonishingly tender mountain folk from Minnesota’s Runo Plum, recorded in a cabin in rural Vermont. The opener Sickness is like a whispered check-in with a friend who’s under-the-weather and emotionally bruised. The slide guitar and tumbling drums move with an unhurried patience, and the whole record holds this quality. Lemon Garland takes on the brightness of a cloudless morning with hovering harmonies subtle enough that you might miss them, but essential to the album’s sense of space. A banjo appears on Elephant, and Be Gentle With Me is the closest thing to an anthem on the album, with a gentle swell and a refrain that you’ll find yourself mouthing along to without realising.

There’s beautiful restraint everywhere on patching. The Quiet One strips everything back to fingerpicking, a shadow harmony and stillness. Gathering The Pieces moves like a fading desert sun, and Darkness lets the slide guitar roam like a distant voice calling across a valley. It’s soft, sparse, deeply evocative, and strikingly unshowy. The songwriting is gentle, simple, and patient, built on real instruments and real feelings. This is a very old sensibility delivered by someone startlingly young, and it feels rebellious for a Gen-Z artist to move this slowly and thoughtfully. patching is a quiet refusal of the hyperactive pace that Runo Plum grew up with, and an invitation to step out of the doomscroll and into the mountains. It’s comforting, warm, and wise beyond its years. For all its quiet sorrow and melancholy, patching feels warm-blooded and hopeful, and serves as a testament to how healing the simple act of paying attention can be. You step out of it feeling lighter not because she hides the hurt, but because she shows how to carry pain with gentleness, patience, and humble grace. The hand-painted butterfly on the cover mirror’s the album’s message that healing and growth happens in stillness, and what lingers is the quiet wisdom, and the sense that the silence of the wilderness is safer and more truthful than the city.