When Justin Morris moved to NewYork City in 2019 after a lifetime in North Carolina, hewas planning to do the opposite ofwhat people usually move to the city to do: give up on his dream. Since childhood, that dream had been simple-write songs, play in bands, live inside "indie rock." But a run selling merch for one of the era's biggest indie stars unsettled that conviction. From his vantage point on the bus, the everyday grind of touring felt out of step with the spellbinding shows; encores gave way to a working reality that showed him the job-like side of something he'd only ever romanticized and left him wondering where the glow had gone. To his green worldview, the gap between the fantasy of "making it" and its reality was jarring. If this was "the dream," he thought, maybe it needed to be reconsidered. New York was meant to be a clean slate, maybe even the place he'd learn another trade and leave music behind. Then, less than a day into his Bushwick sublet, a man with a gun kicked in his bedroom door, forced him to the floor, and tied his hands with TV cables. In the days after the robbery, unable to make sense of anything except through song, he started writing again. Those songs became the beginning of a new project he called Sluice.

Sluice, now a four-piece band from Durham, North Carolina-with Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle-return with Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut. It follows 2023's Radial Gate, the quietly beloved record Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking songs at Sylvan Esso's studio Betty's while working carpentryjobs. Companion is a dating record, of falling in love to the big-sky choruses of Kenny Chesney and Alan Jackson. The "companion" shifts shape: sometimes she's named (Sara, Bluey, Ol' Doe Eyes), sometimes she's a dog slipping out the door in the morning, sometimes it's Morris himselfcatching his reflection in a bathroom mirror and muttering, "boy, do I love you." Sometimes it's the carpentry crew, the townies, the bandmates, the old tour-mates who wander back into his life. In his matter-of-fact, without-irony lyrical style that Pitchfork once described as "a re-education in sincerity,"these people feel real because they are. And always close at hand is music itself, the companion that almost slipped away.

1. Beadie
2. Ratchet Strap
3. WTF
4. Gator
5. The Ephemeral Stream
6. Torpor
7. Unknowing
8. Overhead
9. Zillow
10. Vegas