Fabulous Diamonds

Plain Songs is the sound of twilight made tangible — a dusky mirage where repetition becomes trance and restraint turns luminous. Melbourne duo Fabulous Diamonds (Nisa Venerosa and Jarrod Zlatic) have long walked the thin line between ritual and experiment, and here they refine that language into something beautifully stark. The record hums with unease and grace — a murmured conversation between voice, electronics, trumpet, and silence itself.

The compositions unfold slowly, almost stubbornly, like dream fragments replaying on loop. Minimal percussion and warped organ tones pulse beneath Nisa’s spellbound vocals — sometimes a chant, sometimes a sigh, sometimes dissolving completely into texture. Trumpet motifs and synth patterns shimmer at the edges, their decay as crucial as their arrival. Each track feels like a suspended gesture — music in negative space, the ghost of a song rather than its performance.

There’s an emotional depth that hides in its austerity. Plain Songs evokes the muted glow of late evening light — the sound of suburban windows half-open, quiet rooms humming with electricity and solitude. It’s music that doesn’t demand attention so much as envelops it, building an internal landscape where repetition becomes meditation and stillness feels electric.

What makes this record remarkable is its ability to balance fragility with control. The duo’s minimalist palette — a handful of instruments, a steady rhythmic pulse, a whisper of voice — yields something deeply cinematic, yet entirely personal. You can hear the lineage of early industrial minimalism, the shadow of Nico, the spectral calm of experimental chamber works — yet the world they build is entirely their own.

Plain Songs is an invocation for the in-between hours — music for dimly lit rooms, for the distance between bodies, for the strange comfort of isolation. It’s intimate and haunted, tender and unsettling, like a diary read aloud through a veil of static.

A record for listeners who find beauty in the slow burn — who understand that the quietest songs often echo the longest.