With Ungrateful Women released on Dec 19, 2025, Dark And Twisties arrive with a debut album that feels remarkably assured, intimate, and emotionally expansive. This eleven track record does not behave like a first step. It feels more like a culmination, the work of musicians who understand storytelling, restraint, and the quiet power of harmony. Ungrateful Women unfolds as a modern folk chronicle, rooted in tradition but unafraid to look directly at contemporary emotional complexity.
Dark And Twisties emerged only months ago, yet their reception has been immediate and rapturous. There is a reason for that. Their sound is built on deep listening rather than surface aesthetics. Drawing from alt folk foundations, they intertwine nature, memory, and lived experience with a modern, ethereal sensibility. The band is formed by Sarah Birch, Kate Ronconi, Sarah Passmore, Danny Kilbride, and Huw Rees, a collective whose chemistry is evident in every layered harmony and carefully shaped arrangement.
Ungrateful Women explores the interior landscapes of being a woman navigating independence, connection, loss, and self recognition. It is not a protest record or a manifesto. Instead, it is observational and deeply human, examining contradictions without trying to resolve them neatly. Across the album, joy and loneliness exist side by side. Freedom and fear are intertwined. Masking and unmasking become recurring emotional gestures rather than thematic statements.
The opening track This Time sets the tone with a sense of reflective urgency. It feels like a quiet decision being made, one shaped by experience rather than impulse. Harmonies bloom gently, establishing the album’s signature sound, rich, close, and emotionally articulate. The Lonely follows as a natural continuation, not wallowing in isolation but examining it with honesty. There is space in the arrangement that mirrors emotional distance, yet warmth remains present, suggesting resilience rather than despair.
Questions deepens the introspective thread. The song does not rush toward answers. Instead, it lingers in uncertainty, allowing doubt and curiosity to coexist. This patience becomes one of the album’s strengths. Dark And Twisties trust silence and restraint as much as melody. Oh Ma Belle introduces a more tender and melodic turn, carrying affection and vulnerability in equal measure. It feels personal without being confessional, offering intimacy without exposition.
The Wild expands the album’s emotional palette, touching on instinct and untamed longing. There is an elemental quality here, as if the song is in conversation with landscape as much as feeling. Random Acts of Kindness brings a subtle lift, focusing on small gestures that carry disproportionate emotional weight. Rather than sentimentality, the song offers recognition of how fragile connections can be sustaining forces.
Grace And Dignity stands as one of the album’s emotional anchors. The harmonies feel ceremonial, almost reverent, as if honoring endurance itself. There is a quiet strength in how the song holds its subject, neither romanticizing struggle nor minimizing it. Oh Johanna follows with a narrative quality that feels timeless, echoing traditional folk storytelling while remaining rooted in contemporary emotional experience.
Procrastination introduces a gentler irony, exploring hesitation and avoidance with warmth rather than judgment. It captures the internal dialogue familiar to many, the push and pull between intention and inaction. This sense of relatability runs throughout the album, making Ungrateful Women feel communal rather than solitary.
The title track Ungrateful Women functions as a thematic focal point. Rather than accusation or defensiveness, it reclaims complexity. The song reflects the tension between choosing a quieter life and fearing what might be missed, between independence and the ache for shared experience. There is uplift within the sadness here, a recognition that imperfection is not failure but condition.
The closing track Flags feels reflective and expansive, a gentle conclusion that does not tie everything neatly together. Instead, it leaves space for continuation, mirroring how the emotional journeys explored across the album rarely end cleanly. The arrangement feels open, allowing the record to settle rather than conclude definitively.
What makes Ungrateful Women resonate so deeply is its collective voice. The harmonies are not decorative. They are structural, carrying emotion in ways words alone could not. Counter melodies weave through songs like secondary thoughts, enriching rather than competing. The musicianship is precise yet organic, supporting the storytelling without overshadowing it.
Dark And Twisties also shine as a live entity, known for intimate performances that draw listeners into a shared emotional realm. That intimacy translates beautifully to the record. You can feel the closeness between voices, the shared breath, the trust required to sing this openly together. It gives Ungrateful Women a sense of presence, as if the songs exist in the room with you rather than behind a barrier of production.
Ungrateful Women is an album about being perfectly flawed and flawlessly perfect at once. It does not seek to simplify the experience of womanhood or adulthood. Instead, it honors contradiction, change, and emotional nuance. In doing so, Dark And Twisties position themselves as storytellers of rare sensitivity within the alt folk landscape.
This debut feels like the beginning of something enduring. Dark And Twisties have created a world of beauty and shadow that listeners can return to, finding different reflections each time. Ungrateful Women does not demand attention. It earns it quietly, through honesty, harmony, and the courage to sit with complexity.
