Cursed on Earth

Cousins Ryan Walters and Paul Justin Hollingsworth have spent more than a decade writing actual volumes of music together — not metaphorically. Blood, instruments, and two very different handwriting styles, all pointed at the same haunted map: fate, ghosts, woods, and time that doesn’t behave.
Out of the New Hampshire Seacoast they built a home on the edge of folk and bluegrass and called the weather blackgrass — delicate melody next to driving guitar, banjo and mandolin and ukulele doing work they weren’t asked to do. In 2017 percussionist Sean Joseph Haney stepped in and the thing locked. He plays like a songwriter who happens to own drums: color, tension, a march when the lyric needs one, and the rare trick of being both the floor and a spotlight.
A fan base that had already been waiting a decade helped them Kickstarter Volume II in 2018 and put it in the world, digital and vinyl, in 2019. That was the last full release. Now the catalog is moving again: a new album is coming, and another follows close behind. Curtis Barnes has taken the cello chair. The band is still a quartet, still unfinished on purpose, still writing like the woods are listening.
Innovation isn’t a slogan here. It’s just what happens when four people refuse to let the songs sit still.