“Flexibility to release when and how I want”: Where is Angel Olsen?
In our age of instant gratification, TikTok memory spans and in the era of never-ending album cycles, streaming and music-as-content-and-commodity merchandise, even going a calendar year between releases can seem like you’re letting the music market, your audience and Spotify’s insidious algorithm get away from you.
Letting an album sit with an audience for four whole years with no sign of fresh material, like Angel Olsen has done since she released the stunning Big Time, is almost unprecedented.
Between her debut album, Half Way Home, from 2012 and the release of her latest album in 2022, she released a further four albums, all of which arrived with some sense of regularity. Burn Your Fire for No Witness followed two years after Half Way Home, My Woman came along another two years later, and then the lengthy three-year wait for All Mirrors was made up for with just a year gap between her next two albums.
On top of those releases were the EPs Strange Cacti, Lady of the Waterpark, Sleepwalker, Aisles and Forever Means, the near-perfect contribution to Resistance Radio: The Man in the High Castle Album, collaborations on Tim Kinsella Sings the Songs of Marvin Tate by Leroy Bach Featuring Angel Olsen and ‘Like I Used To’ with Sharon Van Etten, ‘California Paranoia’ with Lawrence Rothman, ‘Heartstruck (Wild Hunger)’ with Hamilton Leithauser, ‘Safe in the Car’ with Jeff Arment and ‘True Blue’ with Mark Ronson and all the touring. For a while back there, it seemed like Olsen was overflowing with music, that she was an omnipotent cultural force, constantly searching for a new song, a new sound and a new project to work on.
But now we’re four years on from Big Time, not that long in the grand scheme of things. Think about the 25-year gap between The Who’s It’s Hard and Endless Wire, or the 40 years between ABBA’s 1981 record The Visitors and the more recent Voyage and the astonishing 57-year gap between Dean Gitter’s Ghost Ballads and his next album Old Folkies Never Die, but this is the longest gap between studio records in Olsen’s career so far, her touring has slowed down and her public appearances all seem to have dried up.
So, where is Angel Olsen?
Well, she has still been relatively busy, albeit away from the spotlight for the most part, as outside of her music, she got married to her partner, and one-time opening act, Maxim Ludwig, in 2024, before undertaking the 12-date Songs From the Archive tour across cities in North America. “It’s not that easy being in music right now”, Olsen told an enthusiastic audience ahead of a surprise set at the Zebulon café in Los Angeles that year.
She stayed off the road in 2025, except to make two appearances in New York to celebrate Patti Smith. Having warmed up at The City Winery, Olsen then covered Smith’s 1978 track ‘Easter’ at the legendary Carnegie Hall as part of the People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith showcase. Other names on the bill included Courtney Barnett, Sharon Van Etten, Karen O, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Shannon, Scarlett Johansson and Kronos Quartet. Keeping away from the media glare that had been steadily building around her life and work as each of her albums sought to outdo the last, Olsen decided to return to the DIY, more independent roots that had brought her success on her debut EP and first full-length album way back when.
Forming a down-home sub-label of her own, somethingscosmic, Olsen hoped to find “the flexibility to release when and how I want to with the help from my longtime partners at Jagjaguwar”. And the second album released through her new label might be one of the most interesting of her entire career, but you’d be more than forgiven for having missed it when it came out right at the end of 2024 (you could say that Olsen was burning her fire for no witness). Side A of the physical release of Cosmic Waves Volume 1 is made up of songs from artists chosen by Olsen (Poppy Jean Crawford, Coffin Prick, Sarah Grace White, Maxim Ludwig, Camp Saint Helene), while Side B is a collection of songs from those same artists, but this time covered and recorded by Olsen herself.
“As someone that emerged into the music scene through a small tape label”, Olsen said around the release of the album, “I’ve wanted to continue the spirit of discovery and of my debut release, Strange Cacti, while supporting and collaborating with artists and friends whose music I have been moved by.”
She expanded on her feelings about covers, saying, “I feel there is something unique and special about covering another artist’s song. We all make it our own, or we try to, but I personally always learn something new about the process when I’m engaging someone else’s words and melodies in such a close way. Time and again, I find that putting myself into various different styles of songs can lead to new ways of thinking and creating.”
Perhaps if we can expect any new music from Olsen any time soon, it is going to come from a similar spirit of down-home recording, collaboration, experimentation and learning as Cosmic Waves Volume 1. That title certainly seems to suggest further volumes to come, anyway, and, if anyone were to ask us if we’re ready for some new music from Angel Olsen, all we could say would be ‘big time’.
