When Katie and Allison Crutchfield were 15, they didn’t just start a band—they built a world. The Ackleys were raw, scrappy, and totally serious about songwriting, the kind of teenage obsession that turns bedrooms into rehearsal spaces and afternoons into lifelong blueprints. From their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, the twins burned through one iteration after another—first The Ackleys, then P.S. Eliot, whose feminist punk anthems made them low-key legends in the DIY South. Then, as often happens with siblings who share both DNA and drive, they split off: Katie became Waxahatchee, mining poetry from the mess of adulthood; Allison formed Swearin’, keeping one foot planted in basement-punk grime. Over the years, their paths curved away and back again, orbiting each other like twin satellites bound by gravity and history.
Now, at 36, they’ve come home to themselves—and to each other—with Snocaps, their first full-length collaboration in over a decade. The self-titled album feels like both a reunion and a remembering: a reintroduction to the chemistry that shaped their earliest music. Made with producer Brad Cook and guitarist MJ Lenderman (whose fingerprints—dusty, graceful—linger across every track), Snocaps trades the urgency of youth for the steadiness of perspective. It’s less a return to P.S. Eliot’s caffeinated clatter than a weathered continuation of it, shot through with the quiet confidence of two artists who no longer need to shout to be heard.
The record splits neatly between them—half Katie, half Allison—but it rarely feels divided. Their voices, nearly identical yet infinitely distinct, meet in the middle like reflections in fog. When they sing together, something alchemical happens: Allison’s dusky warmth and Katie’s brighter edges fold into one another until you can’t tell who’s leading whom. Songs like “Over Our Heads” shimmer with Allison’s indie-rock buoyancy, while Katie’s “Cherry Hard Candy” carries her unmistakable country twang and sense of open-road transcendence. The more stripped-down “I Don’t Want To” recalls American Weekend, her earliest work as Waxahatchee—unguarded, trembling at the edges.
Lyrically, Snocaps roams familiar ground: roads, rehab, reckoning. Both sisters have always written from the thresholds—between love and letting go, chaos and clarity, self-awareness and self-doubt. “When you go down, you’ll take me down with you,” they harmonize on “Heathcliff,” a line that doubles as both a warning and a vow. “You in Rehab,” perhaps the album’s emotional peak, finds Allison confronting love’s limits with devastating precision: “Can’t imagine you getting better / But I never give up.” It’s the kind of song that sneaks a knife between melody and meaning, its pop-punk bounce barely disguising the ache beneath.
Where Katie’s Saint Cloud and Tigers Blood sought transcendence through restraint, Snocaps feels looser, freer—a record made not to prove anything but to feel something. It hums with the energy of two people rediscovering the joy of collaboration, of creating something unselfconsciously together. Even the imperfections feel intentional, as if the sisters are reclaiming the scrappiness that first bound them.
When Allison once said that she and Katie “build each other up until we have complete confidence,” it sounded like youthful bravado. Here, it feels like hard-earned truth. Snocaps isn’t nostalgic—it’s restorative. It’s what happens when you stop chasing reinvention and start remembering why you began at all. Two voices, two lives, one continuous song—echoing down highways, through rehab rooms, across the long stretch of shared history, until it lands somewhere close to peace.
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