Back in April we wrapped ourselves up in the warm melancholic embrace of Hannah Potter‘s debut single ‘Snow Day’, a song so assured it barely felt like a first outing at all. Potter returns now with ‘Judith’s House’, and where ‘Snow Day’ thawed something frozen, this one sends its roots further out, tracing a path through changing landscapes before circling back, quietly and unexpectedly, to something like belonging.
The song holds onto what made ‘Snow Day’ so arresting: the stripped-back instrumentation, the unhurried way each idea is given room to breathe, Potter’s voice sitting restrained and raw at the centre of it all. But there’s a stranger, more unsettled quality here too, right below the surface. It’s the kind of beauty you find in an empty landscape at dusk — comforting and faintly disquieting all at once.
it is a stately beautiful reflective track underpinned by gun-shot percussion, rippling guitars and Potter’s delicate velvet vocals.
Potter wrote ‘Judith’s House’ while travelling solo through Europe for several months, during a period she describes as difficult and unmoored. Somewhere in that stretch, she found herself staying with Judith, a horse trainer who lived alone in woodland near Utrecht — someone whose entire way of being seemed shaped by close attention to the natural world around her. That encounter left a mark. As Potter puts it:
Most of my life I’ve felt very displaced, culturally and geographically, and for whatever reason I felt very much at home in those woods.
The song itself came quickly, written not long after a solitary walk through those same woods, and it holds onto that sense of surfacing — of suddenly remembering who and what actually matters, and realising the parts of yourself you thought you’d lost were still there all along, just waiting to be found again.
It’s a theme that threads neatly back through Potter’s short catalogue so far. ‘Snow Day’ was about the numbness of shutting down; ‘Judith’s House’ is about what it feels like on the other side of that, when the thaw is complete and the world lets you back in. Recorded live at The Rat Shack with Rob Muinos, co-mixed by Potter and Muinos and mastered by Mikey Young, it’s another confident step from an artist who, after years of open mics and support slots before assembling her band in 2024, is very quickly working out exactly who she is on record.
The accompanying video was directed and shot by Harvey Carmody and is as whimsical as it is mysterious:
‘Judith’s House’ is out Friday July 3rd. Potter launches the single at Old Bar on Saturday August 1st, with support from The Hunter Express.
Hannah Potter is Hannah Potter (guitar, vocals), Charles Ellis (drums) and Mark Valentine (bass).
Feature Photograph: Young Ha Kim
