British daily newspaper The Guardian recently published its list of the best albums of 2023 so far. Among them is Radial Gate by local musician Justin Morris and the band Sluice.
The Durham-based singer/songwriter graduated from Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem in 2012 — a Ben Folds Five, The dBs, and Mitch Easter devotee. Since then, he’s continued developing his own songwriting skills, performing shows in the Triangle, with carpentry, landscaping, and occasional audio engineering work on the side.
The seven tracks are filled with personal stories that draw from Morris’ own lived experiences in North Carolina. He says he and his bandmates Avery Sullivan and Oliver Child-Lanning initially had humble expectations for Radial Gate.
"We weren’t really expecting anything more than just being able to play some local shows and having some people that aren’t maybe exactly connected to our friend group listen to it," says Morris. "And then yeah, it’s been really exciting and pretty surprising to see the reach that it’s gotten."
Morris is a craftsman who appreciates the art of painting vivid pictures — at times beautiful, sad, funny — with an economy of words. Like his dip in a local swimming hole on the song “Fourth of July:"
Phone and keys are in my sneaker
Behind a pine I am a streaker
My friends are smiling underwater
I jump the bank a lanky otter
I am looking at water hitting water
Morris also credits the long list of close musician friends on the album for its success.
"I think lyrically a lot of it is about finding your place in a community more and trying to let go of some more like isolationist tendencies maybe," he says. "And maybe the combination of singing about that and then sort of physically embodying that. You know, there are 15 friends that really love each other talking about how we really love each other. That definitely feels impactful to me and I wonder if that’s coming through to the listeners."
Sluice is just off a national tour opening for Idigo De Souza, and they will play at Hopscotch Music Festival in Raleigh this fall.