Today, the 22-year-old singer, songwriter, and poet Hataałii (hah-toth-lee) announces I’ll Be Around, an unvarnished and intimate collection of wintry folk-country due out April 4 via Panther Mountain. Though still shaded by his sideways poeticism, I’ll Be Around is Hataałii at his most earnest — elegant elegies for burnt-out romantics in various states of heartbreak.

Accompanying the album announcement is “She Ain’t Coming Back,” a devastating and blunt realization of crushing absence and abnegated responsibilities of a relationship. Featuring Hataałii’s wavering and ominous cello arrangement, it’s a stunning introduction to the project.

Says Hataałii: “This might also be the saddest song on the album, if not in my entire catalogue. It’s like if Batman got broken up with during a solar eclipse and it started raining blood or something. I’m not sure what else to say about it. The twelve-string guitar sounds like stars in someone’s eyes, while the cellos pull you into a dark current.”

Listen to “She Ain’t Coming Back” here and watch the lyric video here.

Inspired by a blend of visionary sadsacks (Paul Westerberg, Neil Young), country classics (Waylon Jennings, Cotton Jones), and experts in expansive DIY arrangements (Julia Holter, Richard Hawley), I’ll Be Around revels in a peculiar sense of dreary beauty. It strikes upon a rich and fascinating vein of creativity, intent on capturing the ineffable ambience of a particular moment.

“I think I got a little tired of doing the whole “professional studio” thing,” Hataałii says, referencing his decision to record the album in a small, 9 x 14 foot shed in Albuquerque. That sense of place injects a frazzled spontaneity to Hataałii’s performances. “Sometimes it feels good to put out music that sounds like it was recorded in a shed.”

“I also ended up playing every goddamn instrument, again,” he adds, referencing the sheets of cello, lap-steel, and 12-string acoustic guitars that lend I’ll Be Around its ghostly presence.

Following 2023’s “utterly charming, disarmingly approachable” (FLOOD) breakthrough Singing Into Darkness and 2024’s “exhilarating” (Bandcamp) Waiting From A Sign, I’ll Be Around is fresh entry in a rapidly expanding catalogue of music that draws out flashes of humanity in the midst of 21st century American malaise.

Over three independent albums, two records for Dangerbird, various singles, and at least one mixtape, Hataałii has built an idiosyncratic universe, establishing himself as “a master at conjuring a kind of Southwestern saudade” (Aquarium Drunkard). His songs combine “a dreamy, psychedelic fusion of indie-rock and melancholic pop” (KEXP) with a carefully cryptic, perhaps unconscious topicality. As obscurantist details come into focus, they give way to trenchant observations about paranoia, accountability, and post-colonial fallout.