(PRE-ORDER) Rachel Toups “softissue” Vinyl Record

Moab, Utah-based artist Rachel Toups is announcing their sophomore record softissue out Friday, January 22nd, 2027. The first taste of which is the album's closing track your heart, it pours available now via Anxiety Blanket Records.

"My heart’s a deep well and sometimes I’m drawing water from it, sometimes I’m speaking from the bottom. softissue is an exploration of grief that uses the imagery of water as an erosional force that fundamentally changes our landscapes. In this metaphor, the landscape is the self, and grief is the erosional thing that permanently changes your shape. The memory of water is ever-present and observable in the striking canyons, cliffs, and rock features that surround the town where I live. Water has been hugely influential on my development as an artist and as an individual – not only because I live in rural southeast Utah where water (or the lack thereof) is a constant conversation, but also because I come from south Louisiana, where the coastline is disappearing and floodwaters have deeply affected myself and nearly everyone I love. A self-taught guitarist, my songwriting practice is shaped by a familial background in south Louisiana folk, jazz, and blues traditions, formal training in classical and contemporary choral music, and engagement in ambient and experimental music scenes on the West Coast, and a love for fantasy genre and the outdoors.

My most recent collection of songs was written while living and working in remote, isolated locations - montane forests, high plateaus, low deserts, high mountain valleys - where I was (and continue to be) consistently grappling with how to place a small human life within the context of vast geologic and hydrologic features, forces, and timescales, and the interplay between silence and echo - the way the desert swallows sound, the way sandstone returns it, the way water carries it down the canyon, the way a forest soaks it up. Many hands have made this project into something that’s so much more than it could’ve been on its own. It feels notable that these songs were written in solitude and isolation, yet they were only fully realized with the help of many friends. One of my key collaborators with this project was Bly Wallentine, who I met through Stoopfest, an experimental performance art festival (read: DIY clown fest) I helped organize in Moab, UT, in the spring of 2026. When I brought my bedroom recordings to them and asked for help seeing the project through, she took on the role of album doula. And here we are.

Art-making feels like conjuring something, it feels like magic, you just make something in a space that didn’t have it before. In my music, I wish to invite the listener into another world, which like a dream may not always be linear or narratively driven, but rather a collection of feelings and images that, together, build a story for the soul to step into."