The Ticket in This Direction – Paluca (2026) – Album Revie

Album: [PCMS 2026.1] The Ticket in This Direction

Artist: Paluca

Release Date:  March 20, 2026

Label: Pinecone Moonshine

This album made my What We’re Listening to This Week (4.15.26) list last week, so a deeper review felt inevitable. Reviewing Pinecone Moonshine albums is always a task for me, because a lot of their music is very heady to me. Is that the right word? There’s a depth to the sound that pulls you inward and keeps you there. Whatever the word used to describe it, it’s usually a deep, cavernous listening affair. Paluca’s album is no different. It seems as though Paluca revels in using instruments like a semi-sparse desert. You walk for a while and feel like little is changing, but it’s clear the terrain is still active beneath you. Every once in a while a puddle of something rich and nourishing appears – a shift in rhythm, a new texture, etc. The path between those moments takes time, and that, for me, is kind of the point.

The path to the next to the nourishing place is usually adjacent to briar patches; or maybe I’m traveling through the patch already – hard to tell where the boundary is, but whatever is going on in my life right now, this album is reflecting it. That’s kind of what we hope for when we listen to music, whatever the genre may be. We hope it makes us feel something. Well besides the feeling of regretting listenint to the record itself.

The production on here has an odd sheen to it. It’s something I can’t fully describe and it’s evident on Immortelle Flower (track 2). On the one end there’s a layer of carefully shaped, reverbed instrumentation sitting in the background – on the other end you hear this almost bit-crushed bass rounding out everything. It’s highly unsettling when everything’s mixed together because it’s a cohesive uneasiness that never fully resolves. Wait, there it is. That’s what this album is – cohesive uneasiness. It descends into a place where my brain can never fully rest, yet the impulse to disengage never really surfaces. You’re getting everything you need here and there’s nothing left to do but … keep listening.

Great album.