Daughter of Swords, the project of North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig (they/she), who has previously released music with bands Mountain Man and The A’s, announces her new solo album, Alex, out April 11 via Psychic Hotline.
Across the last several years since the release of her debut album, Dawnbreaker, Daughter of Swords’ music has grown thornier, an unpredictable and knotty tangle of technicolor synths, heady guitar, bubbling rhythms, a sheen enveloping songs about raw human intensity writ large – crushes, desire, anger, alienation, the horrors of late-stage capitalism, the cascading paradigm shifts it seems we’re all hurtling toward. Nothing exemplifies this more than lead single ‘Talk To You’, released today alongside a gonzo music video directed by frequent collaborator Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso).
There’s a sharp cerebral tension between the stories at the core of the album and the electrifying, playful buoyancy of the sound, the wink with which Sauser-Monnig can deliver a withering observation. Reckoning with pleasure-seeking, boundary-breaking, and their place in the world, Alex heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet.
A reassessment of inner systems, and relationships of all sorts — with art and creativity, with other humans, with gender – happened in tandem with Sauser-Monnig’s interrogation of the late-capitalist culture that makes life for working artists an inequitable grind. Forced out of their habitual ways of thinking and being, Sauser-Monnig found new energy in dissolving old limitations—be they about the music business or their concept of gender—and exploring in uncharted territory. Their priority became maximizing the mood of each track, borne out in Alex’s layers of synthetic textures and unorthodox flourishes.
Recorded at Betty’s, Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill studio, Alex was built out by Sauser-Monnig’s longtime friends/collaborators Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man, The A’s), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso, Made of Oak), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia).
Alex:
- Alone Together
- Talk To You
- Hard On
- Morning In Madison
- Money Hits
- All I Want Is You
- Willow
- Dance
- Strange
- Vacation
- Song
- West of West
