INYO is a Los Angeles-based artist making atmospheric, acoustic-rooted rock with a big-screen sense of scale. His involvement goes well beyond the music, too, as he creates all of his own artwork, canvas videos, and music videos himself. His shows are just as personal: small, word-of-mouth gatherings in backyards and other private spaces alongside fellow local artists, where the audience is close enough to really listen.
An Ocean Between, Pt. 1
The album tells a story that took twelve years to play out. Not long after a deep relationship began, INYO felt led to pack up and move to LA, and the distance split things apart almost straight away. For more than a decade afterward, the connection hung on through letters written by hand and intense, emotional reunions, surviving separate travels, other relationships, and a string of near-misses, until one last attempt to reconnect this past summer brought it to a final close.
Running through it all is a question of faith. One of them is a Christian and the other an atheist, and the record wrestles with what it means to believe in a God who seems present in the deepest parts of love and creativity yet will not step in and decide how things turn out. It is heavy material, and INYO approaches it with real openness rather than tidy answers.
How the album was made is almost as interesting as the story behind it. Produced by Shoolace of One Way Music in a shared home studio where plenty of LA’s independent artists cut their records, it deliberately pairs rough, lo-fi sounds with large-scale production, steering clear of autotune and letting each performance land wherever it naturally falls. Drummers Benton Roswell and Alex Williams hold down the rhythm throughout.
“Wash” captures the early stage of the story in stripped-back acoustic rock, a love that cannot bring itself to let go and runs on hope alone. “Over the Surface of Moonlit Waters” is where those recording experiments really pay off. A single acoustic guitar was tracked with more than five microphones, but the most striking layer came from an old iPhone voice memo sitting on the floor, blended with crackly audio from a cheap handheld camcorder. In the final few seconds, all that grain gives way to a sudden swell of solo violin, synths, and pulsing rhythm, and the effect is breathtaking.
The album closes with “I Adore,” which starts out in gentle, cinematic indie folk before opening up into something enormous, capped by a big, ringing guitar solo from Trevin Kraus. It is the sound of hope coming back to life after it seemed gone for good, and a fitting way to bring the record home.
Through all of it, INYO’s high, reaching voice does a lot of the heavy lifting. It can be delicate one moment and frayed the next, which suits songs that are trying to hold tenderness and hurt in the same breath.
Final Thoughts
“An Ocean Between, Pt. 1” is a brave, intensely personal record that turns twelve years of longing into music that feels both close-up and huge. With the title hinting at more to come, we are curious to see where INYO takes the story next.
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