villagerrr

Nothing's as scary or sweet in this world than opening yourself up to a genuine connection with another person. Carousel, the fifth album Mark Scott has released as villagerrr, spills over with these wholehearted leaps of faith. His big, midwestern songs smolder with a desire to find enduring meaning in an era rife with commodification, surveillance, and general instability. The boldest and most delicate album to date from the Ohio songwriter, Carousel is a tender and sweeping exploration of what it means to try to make sincere art in a hyperexposed and constricting age.

With villagerrr’s label debut Tear Your Heart Out, Scott started folding friends and collaborators, like Merce Lemon and feeble little horse's Lydia Slocum, into his creative process. That album marked a shift in the way his music started to reach people. For years, he had recorded at home and put out his songs shortly after he'd completed them: writing, recording, and sharing his work with a select but devoted audience all felt like they were part of a single, continuous cycle. Tear Your Heart Out, which saw a deluxe rerelease in 2025, attracted widening circles of listeners.

Scott started to play bigger shows, sharing stages with acts like Real Estate, Greg Freeman, and Momma. He moved down the traditional path to success in the music industry, all while feeling ambivalent about the role he had to play as his music spread out around him. "My dad will tell me how many streams my songs have when I'm working on the job site cutting concrete with him," he says. "It's hard for me to understand it. I'm grateful, but I'm left with this feeling of being exposed while nothing in my life has necessarily changed."

When he started to record Carousel, Scott worked on a slower timeline than any of his previous albums, piecing the music together over the course of two years. He also let the collaborative spirit of his previous record flourish even further, asking the friends he'd made playing shows to contribute to the songs in progress. Scott would begin songs alone at home in Columbus, sketching out their structures before emailing them to friends like Boone Patrello of the band Teethe. Over time, his collaborators wove new and striking elements into the music, a slowly blooming process that deepened and enriched Scott's relationship to his own work.

"I got really excited about how many of my friends were down to play on this album," Scott says. "I didn’t grow up around a lot of musicians. Now, even after just a few years of playing shows, I've met so many people who are all trying to play with each other. If you make something that they like, and you like their stuff, it's as easy as reaching out and asking if they want to collaborate."

The country-tinged "Virginia" calls to mind Wednesday's disarming frankness as much as the embroidered textures of Hovvdy. After Scott sent them an early recording of the song, Alice and Elliot of the Columbus band Rug added a string arrangement to the breakdown. Scott cleared out the overlapping guitar parts he had originally written for that section to give the violin and cello plenty of room to breathe, refining the song's emotional pull. For "Crystal Ball," a song about the bewildering prospect of crafting an image for public consumption, Dan Poppas sent a treble synth soaring over swarms of piano and distorted guitar. Carolina Chauffe of the folk project Hemlock sang vocal harmonies on "Roadstar," whose winding electric guitars, banjo arpeggios, and loose drumbeats echo Rocket-era Alex G. "Locket," a song about love in turbulent times that might just serve as the album's emotional core, crests with sumptuously layered vocals. "Don't forget / We're on a team," Scott sings alongside Patrello and Ceci Sturman, their voices hugging together so closely it's hard to tell who's who.

Scott mixed the songs on Carousel himself after listening back to rough drafts on long drives or on runs, which helped to focus his attention on the sounds passing through his headphones. "Running can really get the mind going. When you're really pushing your body, you're not afforded a lot of extra space in your brain to be thinking about all kinds of distractions," he says. A seasoned runner, he's completed two ultramarathons so far (the longest he’s run is 76 miles). "If I couldn’t play music anymore, running would be the very next thing. Running might even be more important to me, honestly."

A newly dynamic chapter in villagerrr's discography, Carousel glides from slowcore to shoegaze, from log-cabin folk to the accelerated bliss of rock tailor-made for an empty freeway. Scott has a keen ear for both particulate detail and expansive landscape; listening to villagerrr can feel like peering into prairie grass to see what's crawling there, then standing up suddenly to witness the splendor of an oncoming storm.

The album also compiles some of the most emotionally direct songs Scott has written. Looking out across the American political landscape of the past several years, he started penning lyrics about the toll of watching horrors unfold throughout his home country–horrors often inflicted primarily to be watched on television or social media. "I started being a little more direct about how futile things can feel sometimes," he says. "Making music is one of the only things I feel like I might be good at, and I was hoping to say something in a song that might make some kind of difference."

In a cultural moment where the pressure is higher than ever to market yourself for mass consumption, and to consume rather than connect, it means something to forge close bonds with the people around you–to share your life and your art one to one. Carousel harbors a lot of healthy skepticism about the world we're in now, but it also holds up proof that just laying down your guard and reaching out to other people can spark creatively bountiful relationships -- and set the foundation for a life that's deeply, meaningfully livable.

"For the longest time, I had this fear of not being in control artistically. I'm slowly coming to realize that trying to control everything can actually be pretty limiting," says Scott. "Things can go in so many directions if you just open yourself up. I think this album is proof of that."