On the ground level of a Chinatown apartment building, multiple lithium batteries combusted in an e-bike shop. It was just after midnight when songwriter Allegra Krieger awoke to a banging on her door. She made it out, fleeing down eight flights of stairs and a “wall of gray smoke.”
It was in the months following the fire that Krieger wrote much of Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, her second full-length album with Double Double Whammy, a collection of 12 songs that pick at the fragile membrane between life and death.
Krieger’s 2023 album, I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, was a major breakthrough for her. That album (and its follow up b sides collection from 2023) hewed more closely to the domestic spaces of city and mind, however Krieger describes her newest work as “more outward looking, more questioning. These songs,” she says, “are obviously extremely personal. But they also sucked the whole world in.”
Now, Krieger is sharing her first single from the new album (out September 13), a track called ‘Never Arriving’. ‘Never Arriving,’ is a fitting lead single, as the song exemplifies the evolution of Krieger’s writing and sound on her new record and features a lyric from which the album’s title is derived. Performed by a full band composed of drummer, William Alexander, bassist Kevin Copeland, and guitarist, Jacob Drab, the song is thrilling in its compactness. Alluding to biology, sex and death in a series of sharp phrases, the song manages to address a whole worldview in a few short lines.
Krieger says of the track: “In this song I imagine a world without violence, or possessiveness, where we keep moving through life, for the sake of wonder and curiosity, not for the sake of attainment, or arrival. I think the true points of arrival are birth and death, and everything in between, all of the turmoil and fighting, are the makings of our own corrupted souls. It’s a song begging for softness, in a world that can feel so harsh.”
Art Of The Unseen Infinity Machine:
- Roosevelt Ave
- Never Arriving
- Came
- Burning Wings
- I’m So Happy I Cannot Face Tomorrow
- Over and Out
- Into Eternity
- Interlude for the Undefined
- Absolve
- How Do You Sleep
- One or the Other
- Where You Want to Go
- New Mexico
