Myles Bullen is an artist from Portland, Maine, who has been making some noise over the past couple of years. They made a big statement at the end of 2020 when they released the album Healing Hurts, then followed that up with a couple of EPs in 2021 before going on tour with Ceschi as they played small outdoor venues across New England. Now it’s time for Bullen to not only drop another full-length album, but to also make their debut on Fake Four with Mourning Travels.

If you’ve spent time with either Bullen or Fake Four, you know that this is a match made in heaven, in that Bullen is an artist that lives between the cracks of genre, floating between folk, punk, indie rock, spoken word, and hip hop. It’s not a sound that is obvious on paper, but Bullen has been at this long enough to have figured out how to bring all of these different influences together and when to deploy each skill set in a cohesive manner. In terms of subject matter, Mourning Travels is very much the sequel to Healing Hurts, picking up on all the themes of dealing with loss and trauma, building community, taking time for self-care, and just trying to figure out the simple steps you can take to make your own piece of the world better. To make this album, Bullen is writing and performing everything themselves, showing a lot of musical growth as well as the deeply honest lyrical work that they’ve established themselves with. They are also bringing in a wide variety of guests to round out the album and bring in all sorts of different flavors, featuring every from billy woods and Jesse the Tree and Sarah Violette to Tark and Hannah Harleen and Emma Ivy. This just highlights the wonderful ways in which this album ebbs and flows, moving from some complex moments of wordplay and rapid rhyming to tender singer-songwriter moments with lots of space to breath, to moments of angst and passion and energy that push everything forward. What ties everything together and makes the album special, though, is Bullen, and how much they put of themselves into each part of the album. Bullen cares deeply not just about themselves, but the world around them, and much of this album is just about trying to cling onto the good parts of life when so much of the world can seem cruel and indifferent. This could be about friends and family that left this plane far too soon, or just the way that so many people and their selfish world views have brought pain and destruction to others. Bullen puts all of this love and passion and pain and hope into the music to take you on the emotional journey that they’ve been on, and the result is an album that is beautiful in all of it’s honest messiness.

Myle Bullen made a big statement when they released Healing Hurts back in 2020, one that was going to be hard to follow up. The good news is that Bullen continued to write and grow as an artist, and they’ve made an album in Mourning Travels that is every bit as challenging and beautiful in the process.