When Justin Morris moved to New York City in 2019 after a lifetime in North Carolina, he was planning to do the opposite of what people usually move to the city to do: give up on his dream. Since childhood, that dream had been simple—write songs, play in bands, live inside “indie rock.” But a run selling merch for one of the era’s biggest indie stars unsettled that conviction. From his vantage point on the bus, the everyday grind of touring felt out of step with the spellbinding shows; encores gave way to a working reality that showed him the job-like side of something he’d only ever romanticized and left him wondering where the glow had gone. To his green worldview, the gap between the fantasy of “making it” and its reality was jarring. If this was “the dream,” he thought, maybe it needed to be reconsidered. New York was meant to be a clean slate, maybe even the place he’d learn another trade and leave music behind. Then, less than a day into his Bushwick sublet, a man with a gun kicked in his bedroom door, forced him to the floor, and tied his hands with TV cables. In the days after the robbery, unable to make sense of anything except through song, he started writing again. Those songs became the beginning of a new project he called Sluice.
Sluice, now a four-piece band from Durham, North Carolina—with Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle—return with Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. debut. It follows 2023’s Radial Gate, the quietly beloved record Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking songs at Sylvan Esso’s studio Betty’s while working carpentry jobs and wondering, as he sings on “What The Fuck?,” if he should do something else like “go back to school.” Radial Gate caught him halfway out the door of music, steeped in a hermit-like loneliness of rivers, dams, and floodgates. Instead, its release brought the dream back, but it looked different than it did to the “kid reading in a bunk” on a tour bus, crying and asking, “what happened to it all feeling so good?” that he sings about in “Vegas.” Companion begins where that disenchanted loneliness leaves off. Recorded with producer/engineer Alli Rogers at Betty’s in the winter of 2024 and slowly tended over two years, it sounds like someone deciding there may yet be a dream of music worth struggling for—and that the point of that dream isn’t stardom or escape, but companionship.
That struggle is written into the songs themselves. “Vegas” returns to the era he was on tour with Angel Olsen, whose music he loved, watching the indie machine from the loading dock and feeling, as a younger musician, quietly overwhelmed by it, before fast-forwarding to the full-circle twist when Olsen later asked Sluice to open shows for her. “Now I’m at the 40 Watt with my old friends,” he sings, as if the old dream and the new dream finally collide in a joyous scream-along. Elsewhere, songs like “Torpor” and “What The Fuck” reach back to the robbery and that period of spiritual whiplash, now re-recorded after years of being played live to show how time can turn personal crisis into determination.
