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When Justin Morris moved to New York City in 2019 after a lifetime in North Carolina, he was planning to do the opposite of what people usually move to the city to do give up on his dream. Since childhood, that dream had been simple-write songs, play in bands, live inside Inchindie rock.Inch But a run selling merch for one of the era's biggest indie stars unsettled that conviction. From his vantage point on the bus, the everyday grind of touring felt out of step with the spellbinding shows; encores gave way to a working reality that showed him the job-like side of something he'd only ever romanticized and left him wondering where the glow had gone. To his green worldview, the gap between the fantasy of Inchmaking itInch and it's reality was jarring. If this was Inchthe dream,Inch he thought, maybe it needed to be reconsidered. New York was meant to be a clean slate, maybe even the place he'd learn another trade and leave music behind. Then, less than a day into his Bushwick sublet, a man with a gun kicked in his bedroom door, forced him to the floor, and tied his hands with TV cables. In the days after the robbery, unable to make sense of anything except through song, he started writing again. Those songs became the beginning of a new project he called Sluice.Sluice, now a four-piece band from Durham, North Carolina-with Morris on guitar and vocals, Oliver Child-Lanning on bass and various instruments, Avery Sullivan on drums, and Libby Rodenbough on fiddle-return with Companion, their third album and Mtn Laurel Recording Co. Debut. It follows 2023's Radial Gate, the quietly beloved record Morris made after fleeing New York for a Craigslist house in Hillsborough with then-stranger Child-Lanning, tracking songs at Sylvan Esso's studio Betty's while working carpentry jobs and wondering, as he sings on InchWhat The F**k?,Inch if he should do something else like Inchgo b
