The Los Angeles-based guitar duo Duffy x Uhlmann release their second album, Hot Creek, on August 14, a solid set of 13 vivid instrumentals that branch out into unexpected sonic terrain beyond the vistas established on Doubles, the 2023 debut by this collaboration. While still recognizably made with guitars, the pair’s latest offers stretches that are less easily taggable as belonging to a string-oriented thing. Instead, we enter into the realms of pure experimental sound that’s appealingly post-category. Hot Creek is available on vinyl (creek water clear, classic black), cassette (smoky gray), and digital through Orindal Records.
Along with extensive session and live work, Meg Duffy is known as the sole permanent member of the band project Hand Habits. Born in Amsterdam, New York, Duffy swapped coasts for the big burg of Los Angeles. An equally sensitive and dexterous player, their studio and touring credits include The War on Drugs, Sylvan Esso, William Tyler, Weyes Blood, Flock of Dimes, Amber Arcades, Perfume Genius, and SASAMI.
In addition to Hand Habits, Duffy is half of yes/and, a collaboration with producer Joel Ford that cut an eponymous album in 2021. As a duo set, it compares interestingly with the trajectory they have taken in partnership with Gregory Uhlmann. As stated, Doubles is a clear exercise in guitars intermingling melodically, with casual precision, and in patterns of flowing intricacy. Hot Creek is frequently less sonically specific, without losing focus, and is a development that is at once intriguing and satisfying.
Born in Chicago and also now a resident of Los Angeles, Uhlmann released the solo album Odd Job in 2017 and followed it up with a handful of others since. His latest, Extra Stars, came out in March of 2026 via International Anthem. A number of the contributors on Extra Stars play with Uhlmann in the very engaging contempo jazz outfit SML.
Uhlmann is also part of rock four-piece Fell Runner, and he’s guested a bunch, including on records by Matt Kivel, Perfume Genius, Olivia Kaplan, and his SML bandmates Anna Butterss and Josh Johnson. He also plays on the Hand Habits album Blue Reminder, which came out in 2025.
Hot Creek evinces some similarities to a few of the tracks that arrived late in the sequence on Doubles, but the new album is more immediately and rigidly cyclical, with a tech aura that can flirt with the glitchy and reinforces the comparison to The Books. The tracks are often short and are occasionally sharply truncated. “Plumeria” and “Public Life” swing into the guitar duo zone, but between them, the highly rhythmic “Sewering” swings far afield of a string-driven baseline.
The guitars are a tad wiggly-wobbly in the title track, a bit like a distant cousin of Halvorson. That’s nice. From there, we have the glistening repetitions of “The Source” and the hypnagogic jazziness of “May Doe,” as the record’s environmental themes and its experimental thrust become more pronounced. That’s nice, too. Fans of expansive and textural guitar should scoop up Hot Creek and then double back to check out Duffy x Uhlmann’s debut.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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