Josienne Clarke shares blistering new single 'Anyone But Me' ahead of new album this Friday
Josienne Clarke shares blistering new single
‘Anyone But Me'
Listen / share here
Onliness (songs of solitude & singularity)
is due out on Friday via Corduroy Punk
“Utterly electric” Cerys Matthews
“A beguiling alternative career retrospective in which wide-eyed youthful wonder is refracted through a riper and more self-assured maturity” Uncut
“Doesn't hold back, but it never loses its perfect control” MOJO
“Underestimate Josienne Clarke at your peril” No Depression Magazine
“Guided only by sparse guitar arpeggios, Clarke delivers a stark and intimate performance, steeping in longing and weathered beauty.” Under The radar
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https://youtu.be/D4lUPiMG7CA
Josienne Clarke today released “Anyone But Me,” the final single from her new album Onliness (songs of solitude and singularity), out this Friday, April 14th via Corduroy Punk Records. Darkly urgent, with distorted guitars reframing its folk origins to create a whole new sound for Clarke, “Anyone But Me” is a study in possessiveness. The song’s grim and ominous music video directed by Alec Bowman_Clarke is a fitting visual companion as it follows the end of a marriage. “Maybe I just watched too many Hitchcock films in lockdown, but when I was commissioned to make a video for this song, I knew exactly what I had to do” explains Bowman_Clarke. “Bob Gallagher, the maker of Josienne's wonderful 'Chicago' video, was kind enough to grant me permission to use his character, and Chris Newman jumped at the chance to reprise his role. I'm very grateful to them both for helping bring this vision to life.”
The “Anyone But Me” video has earned early support from film festivals across the world–it’s currently a semifinalist in the London Indie Short Festival and the San Jose Independent Film Festival, and has been selected by the Tokyo International Short Film Festival and the Roma Short Film Festival. “Anyone But Me” follows previous album singles “The Birds,” “The Tangled Tree,” and “Words Were Never The Answer”.
Written, arranged, and produced entirely by Clarke, Onliness is the follow-up to 2021's A Small Unknowable Thing–her first LP released via her own label–and presents a career retrospective viewed through new eyes and ears. The LP arrives about five years after she left her contract with Rough Trade Records and is ultimately a striking overview of an artist who has beautifully traversed their own path, no matter how rocky it became. Throughout the process, Josienne was clear that she wanted the album to work on its own terms, that it could stand tall as a brand new chapter even to those unfamiliar with the initial recordings. She also wanted to approach each new song as a singular exercise, to follow the instincts that she’s honed over the past few years.
The LP takes its title from a word Josienne thought she’d invented, only later to find it already exists. Onliness: the fact or condition of being alone. “It means both solitude and singularity; being one of a kind, but also alone in the sense that you are apart from other things,” Josienne says of the title’s meaning. “So, it has both a positive connotation and a really melancholic one–and I feel like that fits every song that I've ever written.”