Songs for Empty Seas

There’s a specific kind of sadness in Laura Carbone’s music that doesn’t feel borrowed. It’s not Goth-adjacent melancholy or indie-girl aesthetics—it’s something bleaker and more personal, the kind that lets light in at the edges without turning it into a redemption arc. Songs like The Flowers Beneath Your Feet, Swans, and Lullaby live in that grey band between grief and hope, and they don’t rush to resolve the tension.

Her path to making music was circuitous by any measure. She graduated with a business degree in 2008, then became the frontwoman of Deine Jugend, a Neue Deutsche Welle punk outfit she built alongside her bandmate and collaborator Tim Bonassis. Their debut Wir sind deine Jugend came shortly after. The pivot to solo work followed in 2015 with Sirens, crowd-funded and released into a landscape drowning in competent but forgettable guitar rock. Comparisons to PJ Harvey and The Breeders were inevitable and not wrong, but they only get you so far—Carbone’s darkness has its own signature.

In early 2019 she took the Empty Sea Tour to the US: the New Colossus Festival in New York, a night at the Factory in Los Angeles, Neck of the Woods in San Francisco, and then South by Southwest in Austin. That’s a real circuit—not a vanity booking but a proper run through the rooms where independent music gets tested. Germany’s pop landscape, still reflexively in love with its talent shows and beer-hall singalongs, was never going to contain her anyway. The fact that she built an audience outside it feels less like an escape than like the natural destination of music that was never making small talk to begin with.

I keep coming back to Swans—there’s something in the way it holds its own weight without collapsing that reminds me of a certain kind of late-night drive where you’re not going anywhere in particular and that’s entirely the point. Some music gives you something to feel. Hers gives you room to feel whatever was already there.