Blue Raspberry is a Zingy, Bright and Just Sweet Enough Sophomore Effort From Katy Kirby

No one’s ever seen a blue raspberry in the wild. Or, really, anywhere—because they don’t exist. And yet, Katy Kirby argues, when its tart, zippy sweetness hits your tongue, it doesn’t matter if it’s real or not. To you, it is. Kirby whacks at the binary between the false and the genuine on her sophomore album by the same name, a sardonic, sweeping effort by a songstress whose first LP was defined by elegant lyricism and a sweet, neat sense of self-discipline. Many of the tableaux Kirby introduced in her first album, the triumph that was 2021’s Cool Dry Place, find a new home on her sophomore effort: tantalizingly slow crescendos, intimate, dialogic songwriting, silken sopranos and minimalist guitars. But on Blue Raspberry, Kirby announces she’s throwing the caution that described her first effort to the wind, sonically embracing the messiness she felt personally while composing a batch of songs about her first queer relationship.

Blue Raspberry is an album emphasized by its lyrics. Kirby is a gifted conductor and a confident wordsmith, filling each song with effortless, quadrisyllabic words and tongue-in-cheek turns of phrase. The cheeky pun “Mutually assured distraction,” the LP’s opening lyrics on first song “Redemption Arc,” promise the listener a verbose, thoughtful project zeroed in on the pains and pleasures of love. So does the refrain of “Drop Dead,” the album’s centerpiece: “Let me drop dead, Gorgeous,” Kirby croons smilingly over quirky homestyle pianos and soft drums. As the song rises and falls in blurry swells, her refrain anchors it in an apologetic self-awareness.

Perhaps the most impressive element of Kirby’s album, really, is its self-anchoring. A number of motifs arise and flutter: lab-grown diamonds and almost-passing common stones, shining teeth and impassable fences, refractions of light through cheap plastic and late-millennial economic woes. There is a phenomenal neatness to Kirby’s writing, an effortless intentionality whose thematics never feel forced. “Cubic Zirconia,” arguably the album’s magnum opus and the manifestation of one of its most primary themes, glimmers in the sun with insistently arpeggiating violins and cartwheeling guitar riffs. “Why wouldn’t that be enough?” she asks herself, one of the album’s many glimpses into Kirby’s breathtakingly economic profundity. “I’m still craving that unstable shine…I crush it up in my hands for fun, precious cargo and all that,” she announces defiantly as the song sparkles toward climax.

These moments are held gently by an overarching throughline to Kirby’s career, one brought from her youth in eensy Spicewood, Texas. There, she learned about music through worship songs. A Biblical overlay laces the album with a shimmering and familiar religious backdrop—not one of belief, but of daring, erudite reckoning. In using divine tales to describe her relationship to the deity of her lover, Kirby pays homage to—and strikes at—the moral coda which ruled her childhood. She mentions covenants, mercy, oaths. The salt of Gomorrah. Jesus’s sermons from the mount. All of it comes in the context of a sensuous, ill-fated queer affair. This throughline accompanies other, unabashedly modern-day ones: candy, plastic, recessions. This is not an album about God; it is an album which uses God as an artistic vessel amid many to make its point.

That effortless, clean, pensive ability is what makes Kirby so singular as a songwriter, and the ear that enables her to pair that expertise with soaring vocals and glimmering instrumentation makes Blue Raspberry a standard-setting piece of lyricism. Kirby’s lyrics stand starkly against a quietly ornate musical backdrop, one replete with soft fingerpicking and arpeggiating violins. Her 11 songs—though sometimes quite short, with “Fences” clocking in at well under two minutes—feel unhurried and spacious, a tribute to the slow craft of the singer/songwriter’s expanding oeuvre. At times, musical refrains feel a smidge unenergized—though still beautiful and appropriate. Strings arranged by composer Rowen Merrill and crackling electronic undertones steal the show in the album’s best sonic moments, as in “Party of the Century,” a brief ode to sexual urges, toxic love and the end of the world that Kirby co-wrote with Christian Lee Hutson.

On Blue Raspberry, Katy Kirby nudges surgeon-like lyrical precision and self-confident, self-contained instrumentals to open up as a capacious, sprawling reflection on impermanent love in an unnatural world. You can hear that on “Table,” the album’s buzzing coda that swells into a massive, epic portrait of Kirby’s upbringing as a home-schooled kid in an evangelical family. “He pours a pool of salt in my hand, showing me how I ought to throw a little bit over the surface like rain, the surface like rain,” she sings. “On the wicked and righteous, the laymen and saints.” Though devoid of obvious lyrical or sonic cartwheels, Blue Raspberry’s calm, steady sense of purpose carries through, creating a gorgeous, ruminative contemplation on queer desire that will leave longtime fans and new listeners alike bobbing their heads—and reaching for their thesauruses.

Watch Katy Kirby perform live at the Paste Party in Austin, Texas in 2022 below.

Miranda Wollen lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.