River of Valentines: Charlie Hilton’s New Album Drifts Beyond the Self

The beautiful artwork, created by Bráulio Amado, and inspired by Victorian-era Valentine cards.

Charlie Hilton’s River of Valentines isn’t a diary entry, and it isn’t a comeback. It’s a quiet ghost of a record, recorded in a Los Angeles garage in 2018 with Chris Cohen and friends, unearthed years later, and released not as a self-portrait but as something more spectral: a collection of songs that float just beyond tangibility. Hilton doesn’t write to capture the self, but to let it drift and dissolve within the permeable confines of each song. In her words, shared from notes at the intimate album listening party at Chess Club in Portland, “the wish isn’t to keep a diary. The wish has always been to reach out, towards someone.” These eight tracks feel like that. Open hands extended across time, the meaning formed not by the artist, but by the air between the listener and song.

River of Valentines lives in the quiet margin: personal but not confessional, grounded but ephemeral, lucid but dream-twinged. The songs hum with delicate admissions and poetic stillness, the kind that emerges when you stop trying to hold something tight under water and simply let it float downstream.

“A song isn’t a thing, it’s an occasion through time, as you are alongside it.”

This album is just that, an occasion. A foggy visitation in a forest, an underwater cave where thoughts bubble up and disappear in the dappled light.

Track-By-Track Reflections:

Exorcise

The album opens like the first ripple on still water and feels like a personal admission when considering the gap between albums: “I am trying to sit out, but they said I’m not allowed. Said I’m gonna have to play.” However, Hilton doesn’t declare herself too strongly here. If there’s a story, it’s a hesitation within the quiet of a liminal space created by the soft chords and gently echoing bells.

Fiery Sunset of Kings

This track drifts in like a half-remembered dream. The baseline and snare move things along with a calm pulse, giving shape to the hazy imagery that resembles Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It feels like watching old home movies in slow motion: warm, blurred, unresolved.

Machinery

One of the album’s more outward-facing moments, “Machinery” moves along like well, machinery. Gathering, cataloguing, questioning. The desire to bare witness and find the balance between inner and outer worlds.

Illusion of a Door

My personal favorite song from the record, a soft revelation of questioning soliloquies aimed at no one in particular. The song doesn’t open any doors, but becomes the space just before one. The lull after the chorus personifies this as it’s less a musical break and moreso a place for the listener to let their own thoughts roam freely.

A Real Love Song

A gentle gesture towards wonder. A harpsichord winks from the impossible corners of a castle turret, while the percussion trods along like barefoot steps in the family garden. A reminder that longing can make the rest of the world sparkle when you let it.

River of Valantines

The title track best showcases Hilton’s poet sensibilities, emotionally precise without ever being heavy-handed, just like the best poetry should be.

Something is Showing

A surreal shimmer from an underwater circus. “Some things are better in my mind” anchors the song like a mantra for the whole album. Things feel askew here, like gravity shifting as the mushrooms kick in and you’re laying in dewy grass.

If I Could Only Get Higher

The final track folds everything inwards again. You can hear fingers sliding on strings, the breath in the room, lips parting on consonants. It’s a quiet yearning that doesn’t build up to anything, but highlights the longing itself and inspects it as the sun sets behind the hills and the sky becomes bruised lilac.

Decor from the listening party for River of Valentines.

In the end, River of Valentines is less about telling the listener something, and more about reaching out: a soft invitation to lean in, to listen, and linger. That’s exactly what Hilton did at the album’s listening party a week before its release by inviting friends, collaborators, and the public to lounge on rugs and beanbag chairs while surrounded by the rich textures of red velvet curtains and the songs themselves. The album holds the tension between wanting to retreat and the pull to connect. The reverbed reveries aren’t declarations but murmurs, offered up like pieces of hair in a locket. Admire what’s been given to you, a piece of the whole. If you meet this album like the occasion it is, it will offer you a moment of quiet presence. An echo that stays with you long after the music fades.

Recommended for fans of: Weyes Blood, Jessica Pratt, Melody’s Echo Chamber, early Joni Mitchell, and anyone who journals in the margins.