Allegra Krieger Remains Open

“Fuck where you’re going, forget where you came from” are the lyrics that zip up “Came,” a song Allegra Krieger wrote as 2021 bled into 2022. It’s a heavy phrase, especially coming from someone like Krieger, whose life has rarely ever been stationary. She grew up in Jacksonville, taking piano and dance lessons before becoming something of a songwriter at age eight. For a while then, she and her parents were devout Catholics, before Krieger wound up moving to Boston to attend Berklee, only to drop out after two semesters. She worked a motel in the California desert, a sports bar in Long Beach, holed up in North Carolina on some farmland and went looking for a tree-planting job in Georgia until she, inevitably, made her way to New York City.

Likewise, Krieger has been in a pretty go, go, go period of her music career recently, having released nearly 30 songs in the last two years alone. The spark of momentum she captured on her 2022 record Precious Thing quickly galvanized a prolific clip that, now, is culminating in Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, a 13-track collage of intense, stirring questions posed atop rough-around-the-edges, stage-conjured arrangements. No more than 14 months have passed since Krieger released the very good I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane (and just 11 since she unvaulted that record’s B-sides), but this new batch of material takes her penchant for dizzying, cresting acoustic guitar licks and coats them with an electric varnish. They reveal a layer of Krieger’s approach to performance that isn’t surface-level; they are a, as she puts it, “collection of different fragmented lyrical moments put together and musical ideas.”

And that is how Krieger folds herself into her niche. Take a song like “Never Arriving” and how its lyrics form a string of observations that sound like a laundry list of considerations: “No crying, just lifting your chest to the sky,” she sings. “Part of the answering, a blue screen, forms things with which you align. There is no sharpness, no cutting, no anger under its breath. Just an unraveling, a traveling into a slow, wandering death.” Krieger may never pose a question in her music, but you certainly can’t help but search for answers while you’re listening to it. And “Never Arriving” is, as Krieger puts it, a song without enough information that needs a “driving energy” to make it stick the landing. It’s the type of song that she’d normally shy away from playing solo, because it demands a full-band environment and “doesn’t hit the same way” when it’s only backed by one acoustic guitar. But when she plugs in her custom-made Telecaster, she becomes immune to commonality, balancing a quick arc with a bombastic, soulful arrangement tinged with her one-of-a-kind lexicon. “Eliminate edges with wonder, for the sake of becoming light” rings in, and you’re left wondering: “How the hell did she come up with that?”

For Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, Krieger wanted to capture the parts of herself she can’t give away when it’s only her on the stage. “Whenever I have the opportunity to make a record, I pick from a slew of songs that I’ve collected and try and find the ones that, maybe, share a common theme or live in the same world,” she says. “For this record, I picked songs that I felt would work well with a band, ones that I really enjoyed playing live.” What came for Krieger happened quickly and naturally once she and her cast of players—William Alexander (drums), Kevin Copeland (bass), Jacob Drab (guitars)—hit the studio in November 2023 for four days was a reflection of four people completely in-sync.

But trying to capture a full-band, all-encompassing sound on a record barely a year after releasing a folkloric array of priceless acoustic numbers is no small task, especially for Krieger, who tours by herself a lot. “You’re a little bit more inward, you have your own intimate connection with the lyrics,” she says. “Sometimes it’s easier to just tap into that space as a performer. Playing live, there’s a lot more different moving parts, you’re a collective energy that you all have to tap into together. But, I think that can also serve the music and the experience as a listener.” Band shows have been memorable for Krieger, because she finds joy in going to new places—both emotionally and literally. She also has a substantial amount of trust in her collaborators, especially Drab, who she’s been working with for years. “We do a lot of improv together and follow the energy of the moment and have that call-and-response with other people while trying to make something feel bigger and more expansive.”

Krieger’s music speaks to humanity and what it feels like to be a person during this nick of time and among other people that are, often, destructive but trying their best. “We have all these structures and systems that are built to help us but have, sort of, failed the natural world we live in,” she says. That’s why Infinity Machine and a song like “Into Eternity” are tenets imbued with Krieger’s love for her hometown. “I love nature and I love all things natural, made by the universe, by God or whatever, but I think I find New York to be a super important place for me as a writer, just because you’re in the thick of humanity, for better or for worse,” she continues.

In June 2023, Krieger’s Chinatown apartment filled with smoke and she was forced to evacuate the premises, but a budged fire escape left her descending down a five flights of steps to the streets below. Half-asleep and in a “dream world” in the moments right after the fact, Krieger disorientedly watched her life pinned by a wall of swollen flames. While in a stupor of post-traumatic upset at a hotel room paid for by the city’s dime, Krieger penned her best song yet: “One or the Other,” a provoking tune about death and the lines we cross and avoid while dancing with it. “What do you know about living? What do you know about dying?” she asks in the refrain, after singing about a neighbor, Nancy, dying in her bed “with an open door.”

Despite being somebody who keeps a Google doc full of thoughts, scraps of lyrics and ideas waiting to be connected (except for a track like “New Mexico,” which came in one fell swoop), Krieger had never felt so comfortable surveying a life-altering event so quickly. “The immediacy that happened with writing that song, I haven’t really experienced that,” she says. “I typically work through things over long periods of time. You write aout something that, maybe, happened three years ago, and it comes in sideways and you’re not really sure what you’re saying. Then, it sort of starts to make sense. But with ‘One or the Other,’ there was a sense of urgency there to just make some sense of what happened—because I was in mega brain-fog, and it was a way of finding some clarity.”

As time passed, life was slowly lulled back into a place of safety. “I got lucky,” she claims, reflecting on how, even though her space had smoke and water damage, the flames never reached her apartment. “We were able to get back in and collect valuables.” When Krieger got her guitar back and she caught a whiff of smoke in the wood of the fretboard and body, it triggered what became “One or the Other.” “I was grateful that all of my shit—the things that mattered to me—was, for the most part, going to be salvageable,” she continues. After the fire, Krieger was writing a lot. “It’s a way of getting things out of your body and moving forward.” Those periods of creativity turned into songs like “Into Eternity,” “How Do You Sleep?” and “Roosevelt Ave.” “I was still in the rollout for I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, so I had some other songs that were, maybe, gonna go on this record that we just didn’t even record,” she concludes. “There’s definitely still a collection of songs that happened after the fire that I’m working on very slowly.”

After the fire, Krieger found herself tapped into “the power of chaos.” “Chaos is constantly destroying, but it’s also inventing,” she furthers. “Everybody is at the whim of these unknown forces and unforseeable forces. It’s not the first experience that I—or people close to me—have had, where you’re just thrown off by a chaotic collision of different circumstances and then you’re left on the other side, trying to move forward and deal with it.” With that came gratitude for Krieger, and knowing that “Into Eternity” arrived when it did is invaluable context, as she reckons with bleak headlines, street dogs, highway lines, Thanksgiving dinners, kids laughing on street corners, butterflies, pain, joy and compromise as if they are all equally fleeting. “A flash of color, like everything else, falling into place in a timeline that we walk into eternity,” she sings. “Under nukes and trees and changing skylines, that we walk into eternity.”

“It was a period where I felt really grateful,” Krieger explains. “I had some personal difficulty, of course, moving out of that part of my life, but that week after I had to leave my apartment and I was getting settled into my new housing, I was meeting other people who went through similar experiences—because I was living in a hotel where everyone who lived there had come from a house fire. Talking with other people, you get tapped into this underbelly of New York where there’s thousands and thousands of people that are living unhoused and there’s constant need, constant chaos and constant beauty. And it’s all happening at once. I was really in that headspace, especially for the months following, and really noticing the extreme highs and extreme lows of everything around me as well.”

“Into Eternity” exists in the same place as another one of Krieger’s songs called “Nothing in This World Ever Stays Still,” which she wrote while living in California beneath the shadow of wildfires. There’s a thread of fragility between both songs. The former is an image of sudden, unexpected change while the latter is an image of respite. In Krieger’s work, life is repetitive but can take different shapes; “At times I’m confused, at times confounded / Sometimes alone, sometimes surrounded / Watching the tide roll in from the unknown while gnawing at some dead animal’s bones” could have existed on Infinity Machine just as easily as it did Fragile Plane. “They provoke a similar feeling for myself, too,” Krieger explains, “the constant motion and thematically tapping into the mire. In Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, there’s more of a harshness, whereas I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane felt a little bit softer, like domesticity. But, for me, they’re both about balancing the real and the unreal and questioning what either of those are. What’s real? What’s not real? What’s your place in all things working together?”

Krieger never thinks about any of that when she’s writing, though. Production is the last thing on her mind, not until it’s time to collect the work she’s made and run through demos with other people. That’s why “Burning Wings” has been three different songs during its lifetime, and that it was just a matter of timing that the iteration we hear on Infinity Machine is the one that made the final cut of the record. The same can be said about “I’m So Happy I Cannot Face Tomorrow.” Krieger had a hard time picking which verses to use on “Where You Want to Go,” because she had written a lot of them. It’s a song, too, that touches on different parts of her life and other people’s lives, and it can be interpreted every which way but loose, despite Krieger having written it (and most of the other Infinity Machine songs) in one frame of mind. “Over and Out,” a track that “feels like a solo song that I played with a band,” taps into that place of honesty where hypocrisies of the self and hypocrisies of the world are questioned equally and willingly. “There are a lot of things that I don’t have convictions about, but you’re a human and you’re experiencing things and it’s a way of being curious and staying open and balancing all the different directions of beauty and darkness that you can take as an individual,” Krieger concludes.

It’s been seven years since Allegra Krieger released her debut album, Circles. Some days, she feels totally detached from the person she was when she wrote those eight songs. But, too, there are moments where she can feel old tricks repeating. What comes next is a measure of growing more comfortable with how nonsensical the act of existing is, rather than believing each second requires an explanation or justification. “I wrote ‘Circles’ when I was really young, but sometimes you find yourself walking in these circles and in these same patterns,” Krieger says. “Obviously there’s been so much change, but I’m still the same person that I was then. I’ve had more experiences; as you get older, that’s just what happens. You collect more—the pile of emotional experiences gets bigger and bigger, and you have more to sort through. I don’t know if there’s any more of an understanding, but maybe there’s just more of an acceptance that things are not going to make sense. When you’re young, nothing makes sense and it’s more chaotic. As I get older, I’m like, ‘I know that nothing really makes sense.’”

But Krieger’s records always make sense. When she sings about working in a sports bar, I feel like I can go there. When she sings about traffic lights and birds, I can see them dancing with each other. Thurston Moore used to talk about wanting to make the early Sonic Youth records sound like New York City, be it the noise, the terrifying ambiance or the disorientation of being. I feel that way about Allegra Krieger’s music, too. It’s transportive, especially a song like “Roosevelt Ave,” which allows you to enter a world and then leave it. “Watching a cigarette melt into dust,” Krieger beckons, and you can close your eyes and find the particles settling on the ground. “The sky is bruised,” she asserts, and the reds and blues push into each other.

Infinity Machine, like all of Krieger’s records, yanks connection out of a place of confusion, and she writes into that as a way of self-comfort. Her material is like a math problem—her music and lyrics are an equation with a resolution, and they offer answers to unanswerable questions. “The night moves as slow as a lifetime moves fast” finally makes sense once you’re living in it. “It’s like a way of funneling disorganization into something organized, which I find to be very cathartic,” Krieger says. “What I want my records to do for other people is provide some sense of comfort. I’m obsessed with SZA’s SOS, and what I love so much about it is, when you’re feeling really pittied or confused, you can listen to somebody else talk about something you can really relate to, and it makes you feel less alone—which is all very cliché, but I like whenever records feel affirming of your humanity.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.