Lee Ranaldo & Refree - Names Of North End Women (LP)

Names of North End Women catches Lee Ranaldo stepping into a new skin with Raül Refree as a full partner, a move that feels both bold and quietly inevitable. Released 21 February 2020 on Mute, it builds on the chemistry they sparked on Electric Trim but tilts farther into texture, cadence, and memory. Ranaldo, the longtime Sonic Youth explorer, has put aside most of the guitar heroics here. Refree, the Barcelona producer who helped introduce Rosalía with Los Ángeles, pulls the frame wider. What you get is a record that feels assembled like a collage on a studio floor, bits of tape, mallet strikes, and voices arranged until they hum.

The first surprise is how physical it sounds. Not heavy, but tactile. You can almost see hands moving around the room. Instead of familiar guitar figures, there are marimbas and vibraphones, hand percussion, loops from old tape machines, and environmental noises folded in with care. Much of it was developed between New York and Barcelona, and the sense of two rooms talking to each other gives the album its slightly off-axis pulse. The pair treat the studio like an instrument, and you hear it in the way rhythms stutter in, then recede, or how a breathy vocal will be shadowed by a ghostly sample.

The title track lands like a short film. Ranaldo speaks and sings over a clatter of tuned percussion and tape hiss, names becoming a kind of map. It is a song about how lists become stories and how stories hold places together, and it does that without leaning on big melodic gestures. “Light Years Out,” issued ahead of the album, is another gateway. Refree builds a beat from small moving parts, Ranaldo rides it with a melody that blooms slowly, and then a wash of sound lifts the whole thing like a flare. These two songs set the coordinates for the record. Rhythm first, voice next, color everywhere.

Ranaldo’s voice is a steady guide across this terrain. He has always been good at letting a phrase hang just long enough to pick up meaning, and that skill matters when the backing tracks are built from nontraditional sources. He writes like someone who pays attention to the way days stack up, and the words here lean into travel, memory, and the odd wonders that show up when you give yourself time to notice them. There is less guitar flash, but when strings do appear they feel like a cameo, a familiar face dropping into the frame for the right reason.

Refree’s touch is everywhere. If you followed his work with Rosalía or Silvia Pérez Cruz, you know he is comfortable pairing ancient textures with modern space. He does something similar here, using old tape machines and mallet instruments in ways that feel fresh. The record has a warm center even when the sounds are brittle or metallic, which keeps it from becoming a museum of clever techniques. It breathes. That balance is a big part of why Names of North End Women rewards repeat listens.

On vinyl, this world opens up. The low-end thump of the percussion sits deeper, and the layers of hiss, hum, and room tone feel more three dimensional. If you are the kind of listener who likes catching the soft click of a loop starting or the damped ring of a vibraphone bar, the Names of North End Women vinyl pressing does right by the details. It slides neatly alongside other Lee Ranaldo albums on vinyl, but it also stands apart as its own little ecosystem. I find myself recommending it whenever someone comes in hunting Lee Ranaldo vinyl that shows his songwriting brain as clearly as his experimental instincts.

As a late-night listen, it hits sweetly. It is also the kind of record you might put on in a Melbourne record store on a rainy afternoon to spark a few conversations about tape loops and post-rock poetry. And if you are hunting a copy, it is easy enough to buy Lee Ranaldo records online through the usual suspects, though crate digging through shops known for careful curation of vinyl records Australia wide has its own charm. Either way, this one’s a keeper. It is a snapshot of two artists trusting each other enough to strip away habit and follow a thread to someplace quietly new.