photo on the cover by David Zayas Jr

Naming a harp album Rotten Fruit is a choice that tells you something before the first note plays. The harp carries associations: ceremony, gentleness, the classical tradition, angels if you’re feeling uncharitable about clichés. Stephanie Babirak, a New York-based harpist, singer, and composer, knows all of this and chose that title anyway. The album asks whether the “bad” in people is something we’re born with or something we build through habits, relationship patterns, the things we repeat until they define us. A question like that might call for a heavier instrument, something with grit and low-end menace. Babirak hands it to the harp instead. And the strange thing is: it holds.

“Apocalypse” opens the album and immediately complicates any expectations about what a harp-driven record sounds like. The vocal is light, airy, conversational; the harp accompanies with the delicacy you’d expect from the instrument. And then the drums arrive. Energetic, sharp, with a pop-rock pulse that sounds far too natural alongside a classical harp. The lyricism pulls you forward (I caught myself following the story the way you follow a narrator in a film, which probably says something about Babirak‘s songwriting instincts, or possibly about my attention span). As an opener, it works by throwing you directly into the sound. This is the album. This is what it sounds like. Keep up.

photo by Nicholas Lee Ruiz

On “Lakeside,” Babirak goes furthest from safety, and this is where I want to spend time. The melody dissolves into dark harmonies, the rhythm thickens into something closer to rock, and her vocal fractures into layered, echo-heavy voices that sound like they’re arriving from a different room. Maybe a different building. The production creates something genuinely unsettling, and then does something clever: a light synth texture slides underneath, gentle enough to keep the listener from pulling away. I noticed this on second listen and it changed how I heard the track. The eeriness stays, but there’s a softness holding it in place. You’re allowed to feel uneasy; you’re also told, quietly, that you’re OK. That tension, between being destabilized and being held, is the album’s best production moment, and I think it might be Babirak‘s thesis expressed purely through arrangement, through sound doing what words would take a paragraph to explain.

I need to talk about “Waterline,” and this requires a small detour. Babirak has said the album grew out of this track and a biblical metaphor: “a tree is known by its fruits.” Judge people by actions, by what they produce, by the patterns they repeat. The album title, Rotten Fruit, extends that metaphor into uncomfortable territory: what if the fruit is you, and what if it’s spoiled? So when you listen to “Waterline” knowing this, the melancholy and harmonic depth hit differently. There’s a contemplative quality, almost hymn-like, and then Babirak pulls a move I enjoyed: the rhythm shifts, becomes playful, quicker, and the mood lifts in a way that feels spontaneous. A lesser songwriter would have kept the gravity. Babirak lets the song smile, and the smile is what makes it land. The song where the question “am I rotten?” meets the answer “maybe, but I’m still moving.”

“Waves and Whispers” and “Utah” are where the album breathes. “Waves and Whispers” has a fairytale quality, soft harp and warm backing vocals layering into something that feels protected, almost childlike. “Utah” goes brighter, more openly folk, with a rhythm that actually moves and a harp part that sounds especially mysterious to me. I wrote “mysterious” and paused, because I’m aware it’s a lazy word, but I’m using it here because the only thing that comes close is “mysterious.” The harp on “Utah” does something I can hear clearly but struggle to name. Both tracks serve the album well after the tension of “Lakeside” and the emotional pivot of “Waterline”; at that point in the sequencing, the listener needs room, and these songs offer it generously.

“Coda” closes the album alone: just Babirak and her harp, a short piece that functions like an exhale. I’ll say this about it: it’s the right choice for a closer, even if it registers more as a gesture than a full song. Some albums end with a statement. This one ends with a breath. I respect the restraint.

The paradox at the center of Rotten Fruit is that it sounds beautiful while asking uncomfortable questions. Babirak‘s harp provides the beauty, and the songwriting provides the questions, and both coexist fully. What impresses me most, after several listens, is how the album treats the harp as a legitimate center of gravity for songs that range from cinematic pop to atmospheric folk to something bordering on rock. The instrument holds. The songs lead, the harp supports, and the production builds a world around both that feels coherent and genuinely surprising from track to track. Stephanie Babirak has made something that works as folk, as cinematic pop, as a philosophical thought experiment about self-acceptance and the patterns we mistake for identity, and (this surprised me) as a record you can simply put on and enjoy while making coffee. That last part might be the hardest to pull off when your conceptual starting point is a biblical metaphor about human nature, but Babirak manages it. The harp, it turns out, can carry this.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub