New Audio: Kathryn Mohr Shares Brooding PJ Harvey-like “Doorway”

Oakland-based artist Kathryn Mohr creates music that exists in a liminal space of auditory dissociation. Drawing inspiration from lost items washing up on the shores of San Francisco Bay, Mohr’s work thematically touches upon the ephemeral nature of humanity, the warping of memory and how one’s trauma changes one’s experience of the world.

Mohr’s sophomore album Carve is slated for an April 17, 2026 release through The Flenser. The album was written over the course of five years and recorded over several weeks in a single wide in the Mojave Desert. The Oakland-based artist explains that her sophomore album explores how memory exists outside the body, embedded in places and landscapes.

The album’s material is shaped by her first return to the Southwest since a childhood road trip when she was five — and by the experience of moving through terrain that holds deep emotional weight, long after its origins faded. Thematically Carve considers how intimacy feels after years of isolation and what it takes to carve out a life that allows for trust, presence and feeling than mere survival.

Some of the album’s songs were written much earlier, during a prolonged period marked by emotional distance and apathy. During a four year period, Mohr was working through unprocessed childhood memories and trauma, and their long-term impact on her ability to connect with others. While the work was slow and difficult, it involved a fundamental reshaping of how she related to herself and to the outside world.

Mohr explains that the album took form after a difficult tour that ended in Joshua Tree. She pointed her car into the desert and drove alone, crisscrossing the Mojave Desert on dirt roads. Months later, she returned to record the album, working along with an acoustic guitar, a field recorder and limited supplies.

Following that period, she began to allow for intimacy and connection. The time she spent working on Carve didn’t create isolation, as much as mirror it. Working alone, out of an old, western-themed jail AirBnB, the physical enclosure reflected the emotional conditions under which much of the album had been written — distance, restraint and long stretches of stillness. For the Oakland-based artist, love wasn’t experienced as an escape or as a respite, but something inseparable from impermanence and the awareness of loss. The tension felt between connection and inevitability sits at the core of the album’s material.

Carve‘s third and latest single “Doorway” is a remarkably PJ Harvey-like tune that sees Mohr’s accompanying her crooned, stream-of-consciousness-like lyrics with buzzing and chiming guitar. The result is a song that captures the inner world and thoughts of its narrator with a woozy, uneasy and desperate precision that feels deeply lived-in.

“Doorway” was written in a Mojave Desert single wide, and as Mohr says, the song “…wrote itself really. The riffs came to me one after another and the lyrics were originally a stream of consciousness and me randomly reading from my notebook.”

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