New York singer/songwriter Katy Kirby has just announced her anticipated sophomore album, Blue Raspberry—a follow up to her 2021 debut Cool Dry Place. Earlier this year, Kirby unveiled the single “Cubic Zirconia,” which we crowned as one of the best songs of August. It was, and remains, a beautiful, buoyant story of queer love. Now, she’s pointed her focus to “Table,” her upcoming album’s closing track. It’s a tender, buzzing ballad that swells into a massive, epic finale about Kirby’s upbringing as a homeschooled kid in an evangelical Christian family (the accompanying Lane Rodges-directed video emphasizes this even further). “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.”
Blue Raspberry is set to arrive on January 26, 2024 via ANTI- Records, marking Kirby’s debut with the legendary indie label. “This record is much more personal than I intended it to be. I was in a period of experimenting with how I write, and what came out was a song about a woman, about an imagined her—I didn’t think I was writing as or about myself, but these kinds of songs kept coming out, with fragments of overlapping lyrics linking them together like beads on a string,” Kirby says. “They seemed to inhabit the same world. I did everything I could to feel like I wasn’t pulling from my diary—every song on this record was written with all the neuroticism and consideration I could summon, over multiple drafts and days of labor to make them feel absolutely right, as tightly woven as I know how. It became a lot more heavily conceptual than I was used to, and interlocking parts and themes revealed themselves in ways I found surprising and confusing even. At the same time, I could tell that singing these songs publicly was going to be a more vulnerable experience than I was sure I wanted.”
Listen to “Table” below.
Blue Raspberry Album Artwork:
Blue Raspberry Tracklist:
Redemption Arc
Fences
Cubic Zirconia
Hand to Hand
Wait Listen
Drop Dead
Party of the Century
Alexandria
Salt Crystal
Blue Raspberry
Table