AMYTHYST KIAH REDRAWS THE LINES OF ROOTS MUSIC – AND THEN COLOURS OUTSIDE THEM – ON NEW ALBUM WARY + STRANGE OUT JUNE 18 ON ROUNDER RECORDS
LISTEN TO NEW SINGLE WILD TURKEY HERE
Toronto, ON – April 16, 2021 – Today, Amythyst Kiah, announces her new album and Rounder Records debut, Wary + Strange, to be released on June 18. The collection – featuring eleven songs all written or co-written by the artist – finds Amythyst redrawing the lines of roots music, and then coloring completely outside of them with a collision of styles that is fearless, iconoclastic and exhilarating. Expanding on the role she staked out in Our Native Daughters – the Grammy-nominated, all-women-of-colour supergroup she co-founded with Rhiannon Giddens, Leyla McCalla and Allison Russell – Amythyst’s writing on Wary + Strange is raw yet nuanced, as she expresses grief, alienation, and ultimately the hard-won triumph of total self-acceptance.
Produced by Tony Berg (Phoebe Bridgers, Amos Lee, Andrew Bird) and recorded at LA’s legendary Sound City Studios, with a musical A-Team that included guitarist Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Alabama Shakes), keyboardist Ethan Gruska (Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius), bassists Wendy Melvoin (Prince & The Revolution, Madonna, Neil Finn) and Gabe Noel (Kamasi Washington, Father John Misty), and pedal steel player Rich Hinman (k.d. lang, Tanya Tucker) among others, Wary + Strange is a deeply immersive body of work and the culmination of years of tireless effort and exploration. Throughout the album, the Tennessee-bred Kiah uses inventive rhythms and textures to create a sound that is genuinely new. But the sonic grandeur of Wary + Strange never eclipses the visceral impact of Amythyst’s storytelling, which is unflinching in its examination of her mother’s suicide, the realities of being a Black and LGBTQ+ woman living in the Bible Belt, her own struggles with alcohol and more.
To accompany today’s announcement, Amythyst has shared the album track Wild Turkey, a stark recounting of her mother’s death and its aftermath. Punctuated by doleful bursts of melotron and building to one of the album’s most powerful moments of release, the quietly devastating song charts Amythyst’s journey from denial to acceptance. “Wild Turkey in the car seat,” she sings, “the bottle’s empty, I hope it gave her some relief.” Listen to Wild Turkey here.
Wild Turkey follows the February release of another track from Wary + Strange, the radically reimagined version of her Grammy-nominated song, Black Myself. Departing from the mid-tempo acoustic original recorded by Our Native Daughters, Amythyst’s new version amplifies the song’s kinetic tension via stacked vocals and a wash of electric guitar. The song was hailed by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, MTV, Billboard, and NPR who called it a “breakthrough for an artist on the rise.” The accompanying video for Black Myself debuted on MTV, BET and CMT platforms. Watch it here.
Pre-order/pre-save Wary + Strange here.
Wary + Strange Tracklist:
1.Soapbox
2.Black Myself
3.Wild Turkey
4.Hangover Blues
5.Fancy Drones (Fracture Me)
6.Firewater
7.Tender Organs
8.Ballad of Lost
9.Sleeping Queen
10.Opaque
11.Soapbox Reprise
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