Daughter of Swords releases “Strange,” the latest single from North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig’s (Mountain Man, The A’s) recently announced new album,Alex, out April 11th via Psychic Hotline. Alex heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet.
“‘Strange’ is a song about feeling alienated by modern life. Or about our inability to collectively self-regulate,” Sauser-Monnig says of the playful and cerebral track. “The way it feels like humanity writ large overdoes everything in order to feel/not feel only to have a vague sense we’re maybe missing the point and all the while driving ourselves over the brink into the great unknown.”
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 at large – crushes, desire, anger, alienation, the horrors of late-stage capitalism, the cascading paradigm shifts it seems we’re all hurtling toward.
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).
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 inAlex’s layers of synthetic textures and unorthodox flourishes.
