The first, self‑titled release by Still House Plants began life quietly in 2016, as a tiny run of cassettes on Glasgow’s GLARC label. Cut live to tape at Green Door Studios with engineers Emily and Stu, and mixed the same day, the recording bottled a particular moment: the start of summer, a young quartet testing the limits of songs in real time, and a label just beginning to define its own corner of the city’s experimental landscape. Long unavailable beyond those few tapes, the album now surfaces on vinyl for the first time, revealing just how fully formed - and how thrillingly precarious - the group already sounded.

Recorded and mixed in a single day, Still House Plants carries the grain of its making. You can hear bodies and room as much as instruments: drums pushing the tape into soft saturation, guitar lines hanging on the edge of collapse, bass and keys sketching out structures that feel as though they might tilt sideways at any moment, and Jess Hickie‑Kallenbach’s voice moving between half‑spoken detail and sudden splashes of melody. Rather than smoothing those edges out, the band lean into them, letting fluffed corners, breaths and overlaps become part of the music’s nervous system. The result is a series of songs that feel less like fixed compositions and more like conversations, each one slightly unstable in the best possible way.

All material is written collectively by Jess Hickie‑Kallenbach, Finlay Clark, David Kennedy and Calum O’Connor, and that shared authorship is audible in the way the pieces breathe. Rhythms stretch and contract around the vocal phrasing; guitar and bass slide between accompaniment and counter‑melody; small harmonic details bloom and vanish as if discovered on the spot. There’s a tangible sense of listening built into the structures: nobody ever quite settles into “their” role, and that refusal gives the music its distinctive, off‑axis swing. Mastering by John Hannon at No Recording Studio preserves the cassette’s immediacy while adding definition, and the new lacquer cut by Loop‑O translates that intimacy to vinyl without losing the original’s hand‑made feel.

Visually, the record remains rooted in the band’s own world. Artwork by Still House Plants themselves extends the DIY logic of the sessions, keeping the release close to its source and reinforcing the sense of a small, tightly woven ecosystem around the music. That the tape was the first ever release on GLARC - a label now marking its tenth anniversary - only underlines its status as an origin point: for the band, for the imprint, and for a particular strand of Glasgow experimental songcraft that treats rock, jazz, spoken word and scratchy home recording as tools in the same box.

Heard today, Still House Plants is much more than an archival curiosity or a footnote to later, more widely known records. It stands as a vivid document of a group catching itself mid‑flight, still working things out and yet already speaking in a language that feels distinctly its own. The vinyl edition gives that fleeting day at Green Door a new weight and durability, inviting listeners into the room where the songs first found their shape.