FORAGER - "Even a Child Can Cover the Sun with a Finger"
Updated: Aug 28
On February 27th, Brooklyn trio FORAGER released their sophomore album, Even a Child Can Cover the Sun with a Finger. Eleven tracks that push the band's signature kaleidoscopic pop into rawer, stranger territory, whispered verses colliding with blaring sirens and distorted drums, choruses that start out singable and dissolve into something closer to chaos.
The band, vocalist Shyamala, guitarist/keyboardist/bassist Jack Broza, and drummer Colum Enrique, built their reputation the old-fashioned way: word of mouth off the strength of a live show tight enough to sell out rooms across the U.S. and land opening slots for Raveena, Salami Rose Joe Louis, and Red Baraat. NPR's Bobby Carter, no less, described their sound as "buttery" and "complex."
Where their debut Pipedream Firewood leaned into intricate, playful arrangements, Even a Child trades some of that polish for intimacy and grit. The songwriting sits closer to folk singer-songwriter territory, voice and story up front, but it's still filtered through the pulsating three-way sync that only comes from a band that's spent years learning each other's instincts on stage. There's a warmer, R&B-and-soul-inflected undercurrent running through the record too, in the phrasing of Shyamala's vocals and the pocket the rhythm section settles into, which is exactly what earns FORAGER a spot on our Jazz Soul Funk playlist alongside the more indie-leaning Alt one. The album's epigraphs, drawn from Benjamin Labatut, Rebecca Solnit, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Ursula K. Le Guin, hint at the album's real subject: how fragile our sense of scale and control actually is, and how little it takes to convince ourselves otherwise.
The title track's source quote, about how "the laws of optics and perspective... permit even the smallest child to cover the sun with one of his fingers", could double as a mission statement for the whole record: small gestures, outsized illusions, and the strange comfort of pretending we're bigger than we are.
Nothing algorithmic here either, just three musicians (along with a few guests, such as Shirley Paxton Fofang and Xavier Washington on backing vocals, and Hans Bilger on acoustic bass) turning a very specific kind of anxious tenderness into thirty-odd minutes of genuinely unpredictable pop.
Watch FORAGER live at Tiny Desk.
Listen: Even a Child Can Cover the Sun with a Finger, out since February 27, 2026 on Bandcamp.
FORAGER is featured on our Alt and Jazz Soul Funk playlists.
To see them live: Upcoming FORAGER tour dates
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