An old Latin maxim says that a problem tangled enough to defeat the mind can sometimes be loosened by the legs. Object Hours have named their new record after it and with two guitars, a drum kit, no bass and no vocals, they have made a surprisingly wide road.
The trio is Jenny Waters and Nora Rogers on guitars and Harrison Haynes on drums, and everything was written and played by the three of them together. Kris Hilbert captured the music live at Betty’s in Chapel Hill during the winter of 2025, then mixed it at Beep Wave Studio in Carrboro. Carl Saff handled the mastering. That information matters because the record sounds like a room. Not a pristine, sealed-off studio but a cold-weather room with people in it, three musicians close enough to react to each other’s shifts in weight and mood. Nothing here feels pasted together.
“Solved By Walking” opens the album at more than nine minutes, a bold way to introduce yourself, and it behaves like its title. The tempo stays even and unhurried, Haynes setting a walker’s stride rather than a runner’s pace, while the two guitars slide in and out of step, trailing each other for a while and then crossing to opposite sides of the street. Around the three-minute mark, the clock loses its hold, and that is the finest praise a long instrumental can earn. “Yellow House” follows at just over eight minutes, and its title conjures a particular memory for me: a porch light left on, a place where somebody is still awake. Whatever the actual house was, the music has that late, lamp-lit generosity.
Then the record tightens. “Mare Chiaro,” Italian for a clear sea, describes the sound well, as though a window had been thrown open somewhere in the arrangement. Waters and Rogers leave generous room around every note, trusting the silence as much as the playing.. Two guitars with nothing underneath is a dangerous way to work. The bottom end has to be implied, scavenged from the drums and from one another.
“Manhattan Marble” is where I leaned in hardest. At six and a half minutes it feels cooler and more architectural than its neighbors, polished surfaces reflecting each other, and I kept picturing a lobby floor at night. “Sunken Vessels” brings the water motif back, and it moves the way a slow current moves, patient and a little heavy, with Haynes using his kit more as weather than as engine. The titles across this album wander through marble, seas, and ships, and that is suspected as deliberate. The trio seems to be sketching a map of places you can only reach by drifting.
“Transcription Beta” is the one that made me smile. Like software caught mid-update, the name hints at something not quite done translating, and the music behaves the same way. A phrase appears, gets tried on, then revised on the spot. It is a little clumsy in the best way, three players decoding a language as the words arrive. Nearly seven minutes of that kind of searching could have gone sour, but here the searching is the whole pleasure.
The closer, “Haunted Forest Near Me,” is the shortest piece at just over three minutes, and I loved that choice. After the long stretches before it, you are sent home with a quick, slightly mischievous sketch, the way a good host walks you to the door with one last joke. The title’s tongue-in-cheek search-engine phrasing is a nice nod to how silly and how earnest we’ve all become about finding atmosphere on demand. The music itself seems to agree with a wink. This is communal music made by people who obviously listen to each other, recorded in the middle of winter in a room that held them close. It asks you to move at its speed.
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