At the Helm Presents:

SADURN

w/ TBD

At Rubber Gloves

Many songwriters will tell you that music is an outlet, a way of processing the material of their lives. For whatever alchemical reason, music can sometimes express what words alone cannot. This was true for G DeGroot of Sadurn—until it wasn’t. Cut off from their ability to sing just as their music had begun to reach people, DeGroot had to find new ways to heal. It’s from this emotional and spiritual journey that Sadurn’s sophomore album The Underworld emerged—a collection of songs that is heartrendingly personal and instantly relatable, a document of hard-earned catharsis that somehow feels at once grounded and miraculous.

Sadurn began in 2017 as a solo project for G DeGroot, and from the start their approach to songwriting was informed more by emotional intuition than any kind of real ambitions to be heard. “I discovered songwriting as an outlet for processing my reality,” they explain. “A lot of times when something is hard to say, it flows more easily in songwriting. It’s a place where you can circle back to your own truth.” After moving to Philadelphia, DeGroot was joined by guitarist Jon Cox, drummer Amelia Swain, and bassist Tabitha Ahnert; the group recorded Sadurn’s debut album, Radiator. After a cold email unexpectedly caught the attention of Run For Cover Records, the album was released in 2022 and despite Sadurn’s modest beginnings Radiator immediately connected with listeners and was met with critical acclaim.

Throughout The Underworld, the rawness of DeGroot’s lyrics are matched by Cox, Ahnert, and Swain’s evocative playing. Stunning opener “the weight” describes the early stages of a relationship deteriorating, with brilliant soloing from Cox and DeGroot’s warm voice intertwining through its widescreen outro. Highlights like “mess,” “never tell me,” or “whole thing” strike a perfect balance between lush arrangements and intimate performances, while tracks like “why does my heart” or “can’t stop” add unvarnished, single take moments of spontaneity, or GarageBand demo looseness that perfectly compliment the unabashed longing in the songwriting. “After this relationship ended, it felt like a sacred part of myself didn’t belong to me anymore,” DeGroot explains. “Writing these songs helped me reconnect with my spirit and confront the hidden belief that I needed something outside of myself to be safe or good or whole. The same belief was perfectly mirrored in my urgency with the band, so somehow it was also necessary for me to face all these obstacles in finishing the record itself in order to get to the other side of this lesson. I had to be forced to put it down, to learn that I could be okay without the relationship, without knowing if my voice would ever heal, or if the project would ever move forward. It was kind of like an allegory–I needed to learn all that, and then I could go back and finish it.” The result is an album that’s full of lived-in, earthly details, that also seems to reach beyond the things we can touch and see–a highly personal and metaphysical dedication to coming back to oneself told through one of the most universal experiences imaginable.