SLUICE

with support from
HIDING PLACES

$18 ADV / $20 DOS

7PM DOORS / 8PM MUSIC

ALL AGES

for fans of.. Wild Pink, The War on Drugs, Andy Shauf, Ryan Davis & The Roadhouse Band

BIO:
When Justin Morris moved to New York City in 2019 after a lifetime in North Carolina, he was

planning to do the opposite of what 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 carpentry jobs and wondering, as he sings on “What

The Fuck?,” if he should do something else like “go back to school.” Radial Gate caught him

halfway out the door of music, steeped in a hermit-like loneliness of rivers, dams, and

floodgates. Instead, its release brought the dream back, but it looked different than it did to the
“kid reading in a bunk” on a tour bus, crying and asking,“what happened to it all feeling so

good?” that he sings about in “Vegas.” Companion begins where that disenchanted loneliness

leaves off. Recorded with producer/engineer Alli Rogers at Betty’s in the winter of 2024 and

slowly tended over two years, it sounds like someone deciding there may yet be a dream of

music worth struggling for—and that the point of that dream isn’t stardom or escape, but

companionship.

That struggle is written into the songs themselves.“Vegas” returns to the era he was on tour

with Angel Olsen, whose music he loved, watching the indie machine from the loading dock and

feeling, as a younger musician, quietly overwhelmed by it, before fast-forwarding to the

full-circle twist when Olsen later asked Sluice to open shows for her.
“Now I’m at the 40 Watt with my old friends,” he sings, as if the old dream and the new dream
finally collide in a joyous scream-along. Elsewhere, songs like “Torpor” and “What The Fuck” reach
back to the robbery and that period of spiritual whiplash, now re-recorded after years of being
played live to show how time can turn personal crisis into determination.

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

himself catching 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. Morris never lets you forget the other

possible life of hard work tugging at his sleeve—ratchet straps, pressure-treated lumber,

contractor licenses, working so hard you feel “fuzzy.” But Companion frames them now

alongside the labor of music that challenged his expectations when he was younger: committing

to the companion of music is going to be hard work.

Companion is also a healing record—a record of processing the past by returning to it with a

lyrical directness and imbuing it with religious and philosophical themes. Morris was raised

around Christianity, but Companion doesn’t preach: it wrestles with belief after disillusionment.

These themes peak in the album centerpiece “Unknowing,” a sludgy eight-minute vocoder piece

built on a prayer by Trappist monk Thomas Merton about faith without certainty. There are

biblical echoes (“my redeemer liveth”) and, accordingly, a very-Sluice line from Captain Peleg in

Moby-Dick that blends hard labor with mystery—“So you want to see the world, have a look

there over the weather bow”—reminding you the “world,” like the drudgery of a touring musician,

isn’t just postcard views but gray water and bad weather. Or, as he sings on “Gator”: “It’s parking

lots and alleyways / it’s light beer piss on couch.”

This steady, spiritually inflected sense of working on oneself––and one’s expectations––in order

to rise above and follow one’s deepest of dreams runs through everything in Companion, from

the offhand “I got back on the SSRI” in opener “Beadie” to his confession “I think about being

very wrong” in “Overhead.” In the end, Companion is the story of someone who once thought he

was done with the very thing that gave his life meaning—music—and finding it again through

the help of many companions: not as ladders to some imagined stardom, but as the thing that

walks beside you and, in turn, keeps company with anyone who hears it.