Haley Heynderickx & Max García Conover - What of Our Nature (Album Review)
Thursday, 27 November 2025
Written by Jacob Brookman
American folk music’s heyday was the 1960s — a moment of collective yearning when Woody Guthrie’s protest spirit collided with a mass cultural awakening. Haley Heynderickx and Max García Conover are acutely aware of that lineage on ‘What of Our Nature’, a record that consciously throws back to that era’s campfire radicalism while interrogating what’s happened to the country since.
Across alternating leads and warm harmonies, the Portland (Oregon for Heynderickx and Maine for Conover) duo revisit the Guthrie archetype: wandering storytellers surveying a nation whose promises are increasingly theoretical.
Conover’s opener, Song for Alicia, is a tender but furious retelling of the incarceration of Puerto Rican activist Alicia Rodríguez. “Her crime was living the one way there is,” he sings in a line that locates the album’s ethical centre.
These songs aren’t nostalgia pieces: they’re dispatches from an America fraying at its moral seams.
Heynderickx’s Mr. Marketer takes aim at identity in late-capitalist culture, her voice softening the cynicism with a lilt that brings to mind Joan Baez on a rainy day. Boars is a dreamier highlight — a flurry of imagery delivered in tight vocal interplay as if the pair are racing to out-metaphor one another. When they hit stride together, the chemistry flickers and glows.
Conover’s Cowboying plays the outlaw card to question national myths, while Fluorescent Light updates the protest tradition for the LED era, railing against technology’s slow numbing of the senses. They also nod to voices often missed in folk’s predominantly white canon, as on In Bulosan’s Words, inspired by the Filipino-American poet who wrote about poverty’s quiet brutality.
The production stays deliberately spartan — finger-picked guitars, the occasional shuffle. These songs could be sung to 10 people in a union hall, and that’s the appeal. ‘What of Our Nature’ doesn’t reinvent folk, and if truth be told there is a lot of this kind of music out there, but it reminds us that protest music still matters, even if the dreamers are now working in fluorescent light rather than sunshine.
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