Introducing: SPOUSES (ex Brad Stank / Two Blinks, I Love You / A Burial At Sea)
Introducing: SPOUSES
(ex Brad Stank / Two Blinks, I Love You / A Burial At Sea)
Iceland-based Canadian Alt Folk Newcomer Streams New Single
‘Splinter’ Released 27th November 2025 via Kalfholt Records
Stream and share - https://ditto.fm/splinter-single
Iceland-based Canadian alt-folk newcomer SPOUSES (aka songwriter, musician, and producer Joel Durksen) is proud to reveal his new single ‘Splinter’, set for release 27th November 2025 via all good digital service providers.
Commenting on the track, he says: “‘Splinter’ is an existential jam about the moment your eyes open as a child to the entropy of all things. Once you’ve eaten the fruit of that tree there’s no turning back, it’s the moment when childhood ends. Ultimately ‘Splinter’ is a triumphant song—though there is an angst, it’s also a celebration of life and beauty and growing up.”
Coining his music as "|o-fi folk-gaze", Spouses is the songwriting project of Iceland-based musician/engineer/photographer Joel Durksen. A nomad both creatively and literally, originally born in Canada, he spent his formative years in the Caribbean, then cutting his teeth in Liverpool on the UK music scene playing with Brad Stank, Two Blinks I Love You, and A Burial At Sea to name a few.
Despite performing at SXSW 2023 with Brad Stank, who had garnered over 70 million Spotify streams, all of the data and trappings of modern music industry “success” didn’t feel like it was sustaining the creative spirit within him—Durksen longed for more.
“I spent a lot of time in a supporting role, I had to cut all that out in isolation to really work on my own songs,” he says of the period. “I felt stuck and unfulfilled, like I needed to do something drastic to find my voice”—and something drastic, it turns out, was indeed on the cards.
Uprooting himself and leaving behind a successful band, along with opportunities many artists dream of, Durksen relocated to a remote horse-breeding farm in southern Iceland. In true Neil Young fashion he set up a recording studio in a stable, dubbed Kálfholt Studios, writing and recording songs shaped by isolation, reinvention, and the desire to create without compromise.
The result is a boundary pushing folk record, starkly lo-fi at times and drawing from sample based electronic music, as well as the shoegaze and post-rock of former bandmates A Burial At Sea.
With deeply personal songwriting at its heart, the album sees Durksen exploring concepts of faith and death á la Leonard Cohen, with songs shaped by isolation, reinvention, and the desire to create without compromise.
Further new music and live dates will be announced in the new year.
