The new album from Julianna Riolino is a tightly wound bud cracking open into something languid and dangerous—equal parts Dolly Parton’s steel-magnolia sweetness and Linda Ronstadt’s California highway grit, filtered through the dusty lens of Southern Ontario back roads. Riolino’s voice, which is now far past being known as the backup singer for Daniel Romano, sings like the ghosts of old selves lingering in morning fog. Where her debut All Blue collected songs from her teens and twenties, Echo in the Dust captures something more urgent and immediate—journal entries written in real-time while trying to decode her own heart.
Riolino cites influences as eclectic as Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, John Lennon’s lullabies, and doom metal bands like Om—and somehow that impossible constellation makes perfect sense when you hear the album. “Seed” swells with horns that sound like sunrise breaking over farmland, Riolino singing about growth and need with the kind of tender urgency that makes you want to drive until you run out of road or answers, whichever comes first. The vocals float over guitar twangs and vivid pedal steel like someone describing a wound while it’s still healing, aware of both the pain and the promise.
Echo in the Dust unfurls like country rock that’s been left in the sun too long and emerges transformed—tougher and softer simultaneously, confident enough to be vulnerable, assured enough to admit confusion, making it an enjoyable listen.
