Gina Birch announces new solo LP Trouble; shares first song & video 'Causing Trouble Again'

Legendary artist, Raincoats co-founder, songwriter, filmmaker, and feminist icon Gina Birch has announced her eagerly awaited second solo album, Trouble, arriving via Third Man Records on Friday, July 11. Trouble is heralded by the premiere of the album’s blistering centerpiece, ‘Causing Trouble Again,’ available for streaming now. An official music video – directed by Birch and famed photographer/filmmaker Dean Chalkley and featuring an all-star collective of fellow female artists including Birch’s longtime friend and co-founder of The Raincoats, Ana da Silva, Neo Naturists co-founder Christine Binnie, singer-songwriter Amy Rigby, X-Ray Spex and Essential Logic co-founder Lora Logic, painter Daisy Parris, artist Georgina Starr, writer Jill Westwood, multi-disciplinary artist and activist Bobby Baker, award-winning costume designer Annie Symons, veteran photographer and Raincoats collaborator Shirley O’Loughlin, and many more – is streaming now on YouTube.

“For the ‘Causing Trouble Again’ video, after hearing Bob Dylan sing about a white ladder all covered with water, I became obsessed with white ladders,” Gina Birch says. “ I decided to use five white ladders, three with seven rungs…I realized later that this references Jacob’s Ladder and a connection from Earth to heaven, but I think I was thinking of ladders as a symbol of getting on, getting up. I wanted to have a choreographed movement with four of us with these ladders. How do we move with ladders? Do we move together, do we fight, do we dance?

“I also wanted to reference the wind scene from the film, The Colour of Pomegranates, and to include as many artist women from the Women in Revolt exhibition as I could. I wanted them to be troublesome, or just to shout ‘Causing trouble!’ I ended up inviting all the artist musician women I knew who could make the shoot, and it was a fantastic meeting of great women, many of whom had never met each other before.”

‘Causing Trouble Again’ was inspired by 2024’s Women in Revolt, an exhibition of feminist art and activism at Tate Britain which included one of Birch’s most recognized art pieces, 1977’s 3 Minute Scream, a landmark short film in which she stares down the camera and, as the title suggests, screams for the duration of a Super 8 cartridge. Birch created the epic six-minute track by inviting several female artists, including experimental music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti and writer/painter Caroline Coon, to record themselves saying the names of women who have inspired them – women who have indeed “caused trouble.”

Propelled by Birch’s springy bass and a breakneck drum machine beat, ‘Causing Trouble Again’ crescendos until hundreds of names are being read aloud: Nina Simone to Dolly Parton, Grace Jones to Louise Bourgeois, Elizabeth I to Stormy Daniels. The result is extraordinary – a jubilant exploration of what it means to go against society’s grain, overlaid with fuzzy guitar solos and rebellious flair.

Trouble: