runo Plum - patching

Every year, Spotify Wrapped reminds us which artists have soundtracked our past twelve months. Despite our penchant for new music, familiar patterns often emerge, as our unflinching commitment to Nick Cave and The Beatles is reaffirmed year after year. Yet, sometimes a record comes out of nowhere and grabs you by the scruff of the neck. For us, that was patching, the debut record from Minnesota’s runo plum. When it first hit our inbox, we didn’t know what to expect, but a few listens later, it had lodged itself in our minds, quietly becoming one of our favourite albums of the year. Confessional, raw and unflinchingly honest, it marks the arrival of an artist finally stepping into her own. During her recent European tour, we had the chance to sit down with runo to talk about the album, heartbreak and finding her own authentic voice.

New Year's Eve 2023. As Auld Lang Syne drifted through bars, living rooms and countdown crowds around the world, most people belted it out with the usual half-blitzed glee. But for runo plum, the song inevitably landed differently that year. Suddenly, Robert Burns’ famous words, “Should auld acquaintance be forgot…” felt less like a festive tradition and more like a direct question. In the immediate aftermath of a breakup, the sentiment resonated at an entirely new frequency.

At the dawn of a new year, this kind of emotional upheaval naturally invites sympathy. Yet, unbeknownst to runo, these experiences of heartbreak would eventually become the foundations of her best songwriting to date and the backbone of an awe-inspiring debut album.

Up until this point, she had found herself drifting through a somewhat unfulfilling creative journey. With one foot in music and the other in education, she bounced between institutions in an effort to appease her parents, all the while harbouring a constant, unshakeable desire to write songs. “I was so close to flunking. I had a scholarship and I lost it,” she confides during our recent conversation.

It soon became clear that if she wanted to succeed in music, she needed to make it her primary vocation. So she did, moving back in with her family in an attempt to realise her dream. “I didn’t want to go back to school. I didn’t want a normal job. So that was a huge motivation for me.”

Photo Credit: runo plum by Alexa Viscius

For those unfamiliar with runo’s output, her songwriting sits somewhere between the confessional candour of Julia Jacklin and the raw majesty of Big Thief. Despite the crowded folk-pop space she occupies, the earthiness of her voice paired with the diary-entry drama of her writing makes her an irresistible proposition, an autumnal essential, ready to sit on your shelf alongside something like Sling by Clairo.

patching is undeniably a record stacked with earworms, but it hasn’t always been this way. Her earliest efforts, charming but lo-fi, hinted at the artist she was desperate to become. “I was doing it all on my own,” she says. “I had no recording experience, no production experience, no mixing experience. I was just winging it.” These initial solo releases all seem to carry the same underscoring question: What does the real runo plum sound like?

As she progressed, however, much of her output came in collaboration with her partner and long-term creative muse, Phillip Brooks. When they broke up on New Year’s Eve, it wasn’t just the end of a romance, it was the collapse of the creative support system she had relied on for years. When that pattern was suddenly interrupted, she had to find her own voice. “We were very enmeshed and best friends. They had made all of my music. It felt very life-altering,” she explains.

Photo Credit: runo plum by Alexa Viscius

After the breakup, she retreated into an isolated liminal space, somewhere between the life she had known and the one she was yet to discover. A shell of her former self, she committed to her sadness with almost monastic discipline. “I would just wake up and write and go for a walk. I would write as I was walking, just in my notes app… I was pretty much not leaving my house.” Despite the emotional turmoil, the period became a wellspring of creative outpouring. “There are so many songs, dozens and dozens from that period.”

Runo’s creative realisation shows that sometimes, to find ourselves, we must slip free from the conscious, rational world and its tethers in order to confront who we really are. “I was honouring my feelings, trying to perfectly articulate them, which is impossible, but I was trying my best,” she reflects.

Despite the heaviness of its foundations, patching is a journey, one that takes the listener from the grief and disorientation of heartbreak to the life-affirming relief of discovering a world beyond what we once knew. The project is also, ultimately, about reconciliation, both with ourselves and with those who have hurt us, something runo has embraced to a surprisingly literal extent, including Phillip in her live band for her continued solo project. “I feel pretty healed from it. Even by the end of the record I was finding solace and moving on. The last song is about my new partner, and that makes it feel like a complete little story to share,” she explains.

Not only is the writing on the project a significant leap forward, the sound is also the realisation of her ongoing search for a coherent musical identity. “I feel like this debut album of mine is the first properly recorded, properly mixed, properly mastered thing that I have,” she says. “We actually took the time to record real drums and real instruments to get it how I wanted it to sound.”

That propulsive energy comes across most clearly on tracks such as “Be Gentle With Me,” which pulses with the grungy undercurrent and garage-band snap of Pixies or even, to a lesser extent, Nirvana. It’s a shift that allows runo to level up her sound, pushing her into a space she has never occupied before, and marking patching as the moment she steps fully and confidently into her own lane.

In the end, the record feels less like a debut and more like a reckoning, the sound of someone stitching themselves back together in real time. What began in heartbreak becomes, by its final notes, a quiet reclamation of the self. If this is where runo plum’s story begins, then the world she’s building beyond the wreckage is one worth watching and listening to with great care.

patching by runo plum is out now.