The Los Angeles project of Jack Dione and Silas Johnson, Angel Investor, is a gesture where inertia meets a wounded grace. Their debut album, I Can’t Smell the Roses Underground via Jane Records, doesn’t attempt to tidy up the emotional debris of youth—it lets it pile up, collapse, and settle.

Formed in 2022, Angel Investor isn’t necessarily a side project to Jack’s untitled (halo) or Silas’ tracy, but a precursor. And moreover, a way to remember a time. Fully recorded in Silas’ bedroom over the course of 3 years, the album is a diaristic plea to archive, no matter how fragile the feeling and even when our memory warps truth. You can hear it in the way a melody repeats like a mantra, or how a vocal take is left untouched, sometimes malapropic, but alive.