Doug Mosurock's Heathen Disco + Phil McMullen's Terrascope Online review Nathan O'Flynn-Pruitt's debut album

Featured in Terrascope Reviews for July 2025, Phil McMullen writes:

“I don’t have an Easy Listening section in my LP collection, but if I did this debut album from Nathan O’Flynn-Pruitt, ‘Songs from Behind a Mountain’, would be filed as far away from it as humanly possible.

Opening song ‘Great Big World’ sets the tone for the record, Nathan’s vocals sounding closer to a death rattle than merely world-weary as he croaks ‘People who hate losers and never played a game in this life / Never took a risk so never found themselves behind’. One rather gets the impression that there’s some unfortunate life experiences behind the words, and this is confirmed on ‘Path and Time’ which features rural blues style fingerpicking and roughly strummed chords before launching into harrowing descriptions of childhood memories ‘The dog I killed by mistake as a kid / Led our way down this gravel road that led us here’.”

Read the full review at terrascope.co.uk.

Doug Mosurock’s writes in his Heathen Disco newsletter:

“As N. Colyar P., Nathan O’Flynn-Pruitt was an up-and-coming feedback sculptor, with a great capacity for control over the signal, but sometimes there’s a limit to that sort of output. On his first full-length of songs for acoustic guitar and vocals, there’s a joy in letting go, as these tracks are rangy, strict, and unexpected, something I don’t often encounter in the steely fingerpicking. O-P goes in for dissonance and chord clashes to connect the melodic themes, a knotted American pastoral burnt down to charcoal. His style is full but not really mannered, except in certain spots where he gives himself more of a chance to spread out (namely the centerpiece ‘Guidance,’ the only track here without vocals) - as the record goes on the patterns become harder to detect, the tone more unsettled, all the more keening off his gruff, single-octave vocal range, which fits well against the compositions. Plays more like a jumping off point, either into more refinement or chaos, but that’s exciting to hear, and there is no way to tell where this one’s going next. A solid debut.”

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