Kathryn Mohr shares haunting, meditative new song 'Doorway' • GRIMM Gent

Incoming April 17, Kathryn Mohr‘s second full-length, Carve, was written over the course of five years and recorded over several weeks in a single wide in the Mojave Desert. The album’s third single, “Doorway,” was created there, and Mohr says the song “…wrote itself really. The riffs came to me one after another and the lyrics were originally a stream of consciousness and me randomly reading from my notebook.”

Mohr describes Carve as an album about how memory exists outside the body, embedded in places and landscapes. It is shaped by her first return to the American Southwest since a childhood road trip at age five, and by the experience of moving through terrain that holds emotional weight long after its origins fade. The record considers how intimacy feels after years of isolation, and what it takes to carve out a life that allows for trust, presence, and feeling rather than mere survival. The project took form after a difficult tour that ended in Joshua Tree. Mohr pointed her car into the desert and drove alone, crisscrossing the Mojave on dirt roads. Months later, she returned to record the album, working alone with an acoustic guitar, a field recorder, and limited supplies.

Following that period, Mohr began to allow for intimacy and connection. The time she spent recording Carve in the desert did not create isolation so much as mirror it. Working alone out of an old, western-themed jail Airbnb, the physical enclosure reflected the emotional conditions under which much of the record had been written: distance, restraint, and long stretches of stillness. In that context, love was not experienced as escape, but as something inseparable from impermanence and the awareness of loss. This tension between connection and inevitability sits at the center of Carve.

Some of the album’s songs were written earlier, during a prolonged period marked by emotional distance and apathy. Over those four years, Mohr was working through unprocessed childhood memories and their long-term effects on her ability to connect with others. The work was slow and difficult, involving a fundamental reshaping of how she related to herself and to the world.

Carve was mixed by Richard Chowenhill of Flenser label mates Agriculture. Rather than offering resolution, the album documents the act of remaining present within tension. Carve is not about escaping grief, but about accepting it as inseparable from love itself.