As Skullcrusher, Helen Ballentine pens airy, introspective songs about uncertainty and the search for identity. While her gentle, ambient-influenced folktronica songs sound nothing like her moniker, they hint at soul-destroying feelings of darkness and emptiness. The Skullcrusher EP, Ballentine’s first collection of songs, quickly earned acclaim when it appeared in 2020. Inspired by memories of her childhood, the project’s full-length debut, the Andrew Sarlo-produced Quiet the Room, followed in 2022. She spent the next three years piecing together her atmospheric second album, 2025’s And Your Song Is Like a Circle. An accompanying live EP followed in 2026.

Originally from Upstate New York, Ballentine started playing piano as a child, and guitar as a high school student. She moved to Los Angeles and earned a degree in graphic design, but while working full-time in a gallery, she became dissatisfied with her career path and quit her job. Instead, she decided to pursue music, and began developing her first songs. Working with producer and musician Noah Weinman, she recorded a self-titled EP as Skullcrusher, and Secretly Canadian released it in July 2020.

It was well-received, and Ballentine wrote the bulk of Skullcrusher’s debut album alone in her Los Angeles apartment amid unusual heat in the summer of 2021. Vivid memories of her childhood in Mount Vernon, New York, were her main inspiration. When it came time to record the songs, she and Weinman enlisted producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Hovvdy) to join them at Chicken Shack, a studio on a farm in the Hudson Valley. The resulting 14-song Quiet the Room arrived on Secretly Canadian in October 2022.

Skullcrusher issued a single, a transformed cover of “Worlds Come Back” by the Hated, on Numero Groupl in early 2023, then signed with the Dirty Hit label for the release of her first original material in three years. In July 2025, “Exhale” became the first preview of her sophomore album, October 2025’s And Your Song Is Like a Circle, which was recorded in more piecemeal fashion over those three years. And Your Song Is Like a Circle (Live), an EP containing versions of four songs from the album, appeared in 2026. – Biography by Paul Simpson