Foggy Notions announces a debut headline show in Dublin for Jana Horn ahead of the 2026 release of her eponymous third album.

JANA HORN – S/T
CD/LP/Digital | January 16, 2026

From the first line on Jana Horn’s eponymous third album, “nothing prepares you for this, or is a cure,” the tone is set for a record that is enunciated as it is open. Akin to the desert landscape where it was recorded—Sonic Ranch, in west Texas—the work’s dry production and use of silence, ringing guitar and discordant flute, has a vitality calling back to early Cat Power/Moon Pix.

Recorded essentially as a trio with Adam Jones and Jade Guterman—how the New York-based band performs—this ten-song album has Horn’s spoken-sung, stark vocals in useful conflict with the melodic, earworm quality of Guterman’s bass, and Jones’ jazz and punk-influenced approach to drums. The flute and clarinet of Adelyn Strei diverges and coalesces, spirit-like (“Go on, move your body,” “Untitled (Cig)”), while pianist Miles Hewitt grounds, sometimes with a single note repeated, like a hammer on a nail (“All in bet”). This third iteration from Horn reveals the artist at perhaps her most distilled and resourceful, hitting on a feeling with a touch.

Personal statement:

This album comes mostly from my first year of living in New York. There’s some bleed over from leaving Charlottesville, where I’d been in a graduate program for writing. And then there’s “Go on, move your body,” written in the Optimism days, before it was reissued by No Quarter. I can see how the conditions of my life may have caused this song to resurface, but it wasn’t a conscious decision then. It just felt like it was time, or something. To be reiterated. 

Moving to New York after graduation had felt almost too right, like an arranged marriage. I was pretty unhappy for a while. My life was still in Virginia, where my friends were, in Texas, where my mother was learning to live again after years of being passed from one hospital to the next, like a crime no one wanted to be responsible for. I drifted through the city in pajamas, at midday. I wasn’t the only one. I saw real people painting (with paintbrushes) murals advertising iPhones, finding it funny to hump barstools, looking everywhere for their stolen cars, as though they had only been hiding. There’s a city marshal who once had a car towed with a child inside. 

I was sanded-down and open and far away. And then I would come to (“Blue skies again / It isn’t the end / It is like my eyes to cry / To die and die to feel / the cycle repeat / The pit is the seed / It’s alright”).

The last verse of “Come on” is a collage of these things: “In the city I was on time / Couldn’t get off my mind / On pills, on trains, on praying / take, take, take / Take off my mind / On wind, on steam / Waiting rooms, hospitals / Angel trash bag wings / fly on a two-moon night / I couldn’t change / I couldn’t change her mind.”

At some point my friend Helena Deland thought to keep each other up with a songwriting group, so we did and called it the Dead Letters Office, after “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” A letter a week or so. “Untitled (Cig)” and “Unused” came from that. I wrote “Love” at her kitchen table with her weirdly-tuned guitar that was also out of tune, we learned later when trying to solve it from the voice memo. Someone should make a game of that. 

“All in bet” signaled a kind of end, or change, to this period. I wrote it after a late night at a dive in the Lower East Side with a friend who helped me realize it was “not over yet / all in bet.” It felt like a prayer, a total guess. The last line of the record is “Spirit, if you do the writing, I will sign.”

In New York, a city I grew to love when I could see it, I’d been performing as a trio with Adam drumming and Jade Guterman on bass. Jade has a very melodic, almost lead guitar style of playing, and I tend to play guitar like a bass, hanging out on the top two strings and letting the others ring. Adam’s approach is very instinctual and in the moment. There’s some inherent conflict, I think, in any creation, but also apparently in our dynamic, and I wanted the recording to reflect that. Our broken-down, elemental approach. As much as the music, the silence, space. 

In fall of 2024, we traveled to Texas to record in the desert for ten days at Sonic Ranch, a studio where many albums I love were made. We slept in a house next to the studio and took walks down the mile-long dirt road with Shirley, the studio dog, to the kitchen. The whole thing was very pure, and focused. I remember us listening back after a few days and being surprised at what we didn’t remember playing, as though we’d been recording in trance. Halfway in, our friend Adelyn Strei came down to stay with us and improvise on clarinet and flute. I love how the bass and clarinet move together on “Don’t think,” how the flute on “Go on, move your body” sort of signifies its surroundings, like trees in the wind.

Back in New York, I spent a while working on the songs with an old synthesizer and recording background vocal arrangements in my bedroom, going every couple of weeks to my friend Miles Hewitt’s apartment to sit with him at the piano. We sat side by side, him patiently translating while I hummed and pointed, until we reached a shared meaning for “It’s alright,” “All in bet,” “Unused,” and “Designer,” which we recorded during off hours at the Power Station. 

• Jana Horn, October 2025