Exclaim! New Faves alum Kee Avil has announced her sophomore album, led by thrumming new single "Felt."
The follow-up to the Montrealer's JUNO-nominated 2022 debut Crease, Spine is out May 3 on Constellation Records. It was written in Avil's home studio after a lapse in writing while touring behind her debut and working on other projects.
“This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch," she explained in a statement. According to press notes, it sees the artist strip back her textured avant-pop sound into something much rawer — she calls it folk, while writer JJ Skolnik also observed a "hypnotic post-punk sonambulance" across the collection, which purposefully only employs four elements or less on each of its 10 tracks.
Here's what the producer herself had to say about the album:
I heard recently that crafting memories can feel like slowing time. For two years after Crease, I didn't write music, words were just tip toeing in my brain. Spine had to happen fast, so I wouldn't get frozen in time again.
Crease was controlled and synthetic. Spine is raw and bony. I wanted to write songs that I could sing on guitar, to combine the energy of folk music with dry, sharp electronics. These are songs for the past year, but they also contain all the years before, these various versions of myself. Seeking the common thread between these rejected ways of being. Not to erase, but maybe realign.
In my album notes, the idea of clutter reappears constantly, of feeling buried. These songs are minimal, written with four elements each, or less. I wanted to show their core, to strip off the excess, to dig myself out.
I wanted to condense time. I like seeing it pass, how dust finds each crevice to settle in. It feels like a cloudy massage that numbs my brain. The mould of the artwork is this beauty in decay. The imagery is raw, exposed, like the music feels — teasing, confessional, telling a secret about nothing. The album took one year to finish, this is a snapshot of that year being pulled apart into 40 minutes.
Watch the "Felt" video, directed by Clara L'Heureux-Garcia, below. Keep scrolling for the Spine tracklist.
Spine:
1. Felt
2. the iris dry
3. remember me
4. do this again
5. Fading
6. Gelatin
7. showed you
8. at his hands
9. under
10. Croak