New York-based gothic folk singer-songwriter Kira McSpice announces The House, her upcoming album and third full-length release of 2026. Out October 23 via Danger Collective, it is the third installment of her four-part series, ‘A Return in 4 Parts,’ in which she documents a trance-like desert journey to a house that resembles McSpice’s childhood home in Harlem, GA. Today, she shares the lead single “Return,” a recognition of her early exposure to grief, offset by a pure, childlike wonder that can only come back to her in ephemeral glimpses.
In preparation for her Saturn return, McSpice sought help from breathwork facilitator and hypnotherapist Trina Merz, who guided her through a trance that took her on a spiritual trek, revisiting the past and giving her tools to navigate the next phase of her life. This journey led her to a train she rode to the desert, where, upon arrival, she stumbled upon a recreation of her childhood home, which her family and her left at 13. What came of it was four albums-worth of material, dancing between gothic folk, alternative rock, ambient, and chamber music, including a makeshift choir of mutual friends symbolizing the community she had in her old stomping grounds and the spiritual entities that call her back to her childhood.
“Return”, the first track revealed from The House, finds McSpice at the threshold of her family home, both comforted and haunted by the ghosts of her youth. “In this song, I sing about arriving at my childhood home and reflecting on the memories I had there, as well as where I live now and how that house holds so much too,” says the singer-songwriter. “I remembered my dad told me, ‘You leave you can never come back!’ so many times when he was yelling at me and I would tell him I was going to run away.” His words ring through McSpice’s new single, sung in a piercing operatic cry. “I guess he was right,” McSpice adds. “I couldn’t really ever come back once I left. It’s very different now, and it is not my home, but it felt important to be standing there in front of the house feeling how much it held inside its walls.”
The new single is accompanied by a music video directed by Brandon Brumm and filmed at the church-turned-community space The Granite Church in Redding, CT, where she recorded the album with co-producers and frequent collaborators Sean Brennan and Tyler Skoglund. “There was a moment at the end of filming where I did an improv dance in the dark with the sister dancers Rainey and Anabelle Scarborough [the Sun and the Moon],” McSpice explains. Though she’s not a trained dancer, she was taken by the overwhelming love and support felt by all members of the crew on set. “We did this together,” she continues, “and I felt so open and like I was exactly where I needed to be. I was so incredibly happy to be there with everyone dancing to this song that is so meaningful to me.”
Brumm adds, “Like the memories of an old family house, ‘Return’ is haunted by nostalgia. This nostalgia is the pain of never truly being able to return home. This place we might have once outgrew, lives on in the mind as a phantom…And yet, while the past may haunt us indefinitely, we have the choice to glean what we can from it and to live on anyway. One can never step in the same river twice, for good or for ill, and it was this complexity that struck a major chord with me when I first encountered the track.”
Working with Kira McSpice on the film, he notes, allowed him to tap into the artist’s spiritual fascination with the Sun and the Moon, seeking order and clarity within the movements of the cosmos. “We chose to reference the nostalgic past directly by shooting on the semi-defunct mini-DV format. It’s a format that evokes both home movies and the low-res textures of some favorite classic music videos,” he explains. “Kira and I are both huge fans of Kate Bush and many of her videos live on as VHS-rips on YouTube. It’s a sincere and playful homage to those aesthetics: sometimes quirky, always mystical. The creative team behind this project put a ton of heart and soul into it and I couldn’t be more grateful for their efforts.”
The House functions as the climax of ‘A Return in 4 Parts’, following this year’s releases of Saturnism and The Desert. In her third album, McSpice forces herself to confront life-altering experiences she had tried to bury but needed to revisit: her parents’ fraught relationship, the psychological harm of her father’s unmanageable temper, and the death of a friend. She realized she had carried that uneasy, morose energy into adulthood, and had to learn to leave it behind.
“By exploring my childhood home in my mind, this allowed me to parse out all of these different parts of myself from that time and go forward with what I wanted to keep from then,” says the musician. The trance gave her a new perspective on the qualities of her younger self that remain important to her, as well as the traumas that she can now find the strength to close the chapter on. “In a way, it [helped me] compartmentalize [those traumas]. All of these things are in the house, and I can leave them here now; it’s safe to do so,” she explains.
The House is out October 23 via Danger Collective. Connect with Kira McSpice on her website, Instagram, Bandcamp, YouTube, and TikTok for future updates.
