Few artists captivated us in 2021 quite like Sinead O’Brien, the Irish wordsmith who always seems like the coolest person in the room and the type of person who would absolutely hate to be considered the coolest person in the room. Her April track “Kid Stuff” has a hypnotic quality to it, and O’Brien feels like a timeless anomaly in the current musical landscape, a time-traveller creator who we could have mysteriously read about back in 1982 or will soon obsess over in virtual spaces come 2042.
This week the post-punk poet and music oracle has announced her debut album, Time Bend and Break The Bower, and it’s out June 10 via Chess Club Records. It already feels like one of the most essential records in ’22, and that sentiment is enhanced by the voltaic lead single “Holy Country.” It dropped yesterday (February 16), complete with a music video directed by Chloé le Drezen.
On Time Bend and Break The Bower, O’Brien teams with producer Dan Carey (Fontaines DC, Wet Leg, Squid, Black Midi, Foals, Kae Tempest) for what should be 11 captivating tracks. We already have two locked in, following November’s “Girlkind”.
“The story of the album is built up in layers; one song giving context to the next” says O’Brien. “I thought about becoming undressed; testing my ideas, my voice. Working myself out across themes of identity, curiosity, creative process. Experimenting with the form and shape of language, using tone and delivery to get to the immediate centre of what I am saying. The record opens and closes with poems, these tracks have a really clear direction — a form which is set apart from the ‘songs’. I hold stops in different places, moving emphatically through the lyrics, changing the meaning. No punctuation — only the voice mapping out the way.”
She adds, wonderfully: “The album title Time Bend and Break The Bower, from the song ‘Multitudes’, came into my head and made its demands, an idea that pressed on me throughout the record. It has a very active role. The clock symbol is enlarged, it looms like a moon over my activity watching, counting me down to zero. Dripping with self-sabotage and the feeling of being chased; it pulls and pushes against the verses which talk of ’Multitudes’; the things that faithfully come back — the images, the words, creativity. It is creativity itself.”
Embrace.