Madeline Kenney Releases 'Plain Boring Disaster'
TAKEN FROM THE UPCOMING ALBUM 'A NEW REALITY MIND', OUT 28TH JULY ON CARPARK
LISTEN HERE
https://youtu.be/S-XxFD80C8s
Madeline Kenney's new LP, A New Reality Mind, is due out July 28th via Carpark Records. Her fourth LP, and the follow up to her breakthrough Sucker’s Lunch (2020), the album's early singles have been warmly received over the last couple of months, and Kenney's most recent offering, the mesmerizing "I Drew A Line," earning praise from The New York Times, who said that Kenney "fills her sonic canvas with bold, angular shapes...on this tale of self-revision and emotional growth."
Today, Kenney is sharing a final pre-release single from the record, a track called "Plain Boring Disaster."
"I think it’s easy to romanticize one’s life, to give meaning to mistakes and import to missteps," Kenney says of the song. "In this song, I believe I realized that my mistakes did not, in fact, make me unique or genius or special. I, like everyone else, am muddling through my most ordinary disaster of a life. Song can make you feel like you have something to say or expose – here I’m reminding myself that nothing is truly new."
Listen to 'Plain Boring Disaster' here
In the quiet surrounding the pandemic, Madeline Kenney made sonic sketches in the basement studio she shared with her then-partner. She arranged phrases that called her—the sharp knife of a synth cutting a path along a blooming arpeggio, drums stuttering firm and tight. Working this way, she amassed a collection of songs she had no particular aims for. Some formed her 2021 EP Summer Quarter, others languished.
But in 2022, Kenney’s partner left suddenly and without warning, plunging her into the solitary act of untangling what happened. In the wake of her ensuing depression, she revisited these songs and found in them something prescient. She’d already laid the foundation for A New Reality Mind.
That her relationship’s end came without warning is only half true, though. The warnings were in the feelings and fears that inspired Kenney’s critically-acclaimed third album, Sucker’s Lunch (2020), which was co-produced by Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes) and centered around the idea of flinging oneself freely into the seemingly-assured destruction of new love, come what may.
If sonically Sucker’s Lunch was letting yourself be pulled into the warm bath of a good story, A New Reality Mind reflects the harsh light of truth coming to break the spell. But as sobering as morning light can be, there’s brilliance to it, too. To see in the clarity of day is a gift. A revolution. Rather than reckoning with love lost, the songs on A New Reality Mind grapple with the self that chose to fall.
TRACKLISTING
1. Intro
2. Plain Boring Disaster
3. Superficial Conversation
4. Reality Mind
5. I Drew A Line
6. It Carries On
7. Red Emotion
8. The Same Again
9. HFAM
10. Leaves Me Dry
11. Expectations
