Walnut Street

A Box Of Stars — 2026

“Walnut Street sounds humble at first, then slowly reveals just how much emotional weight it carries.”

A Box of Stars is Macaulay Lerman, a Burlington, Vermont songwriter who has been putting out records under the name since 2018, and he made Walnut Street to grieve a whole stretch of life he can’t get back. The title is a real block in the city’s Old North End, a row of houses he and his former partner used to pass on their walks. When the relationship ended, he didn’t write a breakup album so much as an album about missing an entire era, and the smartest thing he does is give that ache an address. “I love you like a house,” he sings at one point, and the whole record feels like it is trying to build one out of memory.

Cut over a long weekend in a friend’s spare room with Eric George running the boards, the album stays loose and warm with some excellent harmony vocals and bass from Katy Hellman. Her vocals trail Lerman so closely on multiple tracks that the two of them start to sound like one person remembering out loud, while violin and pedal steel drift in around the edges giving the entire record an indie folk vibe. Lerman delivers a deeply resonant baritone voice. It’s deadpan, stoic, and sparse, using his commanding register to create a dry and hypnotic, listening experience that brings you into Walnut Street which sounds humble until it quietly wrecks you.

Right in the opening track “Lake House” Lerman talks about “getting stones and watching Love Island” which is one of those lines that instantly pulls you into the lyrics. “Haydn’s Song” begins as a memorial for a friend who died and keeps widening until it holds every other loss at once, old bands, past loves, a house that still has his name on the mailbox somewhere in his head. Lerman sings it flat and unhurried, no big swell to hide behind. “Movies Later” is a song about the person you used to be needing to talk to the person you are now, and it closes on “you’ll be different then, and I’ll be different then, but it’s hard to say just how,” a line that sounds like a shrug until you notice how much uncertainty is folded into it. I also really like how “Remain” has a great foot tapping pace that makes it more intense with pleads to stay as the instruments expand and contract in all the right places.

This record reminds me of Purple Mountains, David Berman’s final project, where plain language and buried heartbreak shared every line and the smallest detail felt loaded. Lerman has that same knack for making an offhand image carry more than it should, though he swaps Berman’s gallows humor for something softer and more forgiving. People who love Jason Molina will know the way these songs treat grief like something common and in the same low pull that ran through his Songs: Ohia records. And anyone who is always pulled into the world of Bill Callahan will appreciate Lerman’s knack for reaching for the flattest and most specific words possible because dressing the hard stuff up would feel like a lie.

I sat with this record for some time but its dynamics keep me coming back. I love the stories and vocal layering that just makes each song continually sound familiar. That familiarity is what gives A Box Of Stars its high replay value and makes this new music you will want to check out.