Katy Kirby - Blue Raspberry (January 26, 2024)

ItsAndrew · Oct 24, 2023

01 Redemption Arc
02 Fences
03 Cubic Zirconia
04 Hand to Hand
05 Wait Listen
06 Drop Dead
07 Party of the Century
08 Alexandria
09 Salt Crystal
10 Blue Raspberry
11 Table

Let's face it: There's no such thing as “real life”. There is only experience and the negotiations we undertake in order to share it with other people. On her second album Blue Raspberry, the New York-based songwriter Katy Kirby dives headlong into the artifice of intimacy: the glitter smeared across eyelid creases, the smiles switched on with an electric buzz, the synthetic rose scent all over someone who's made herself smell nice just for you. An exegesis of Kirby's first queer relationship, Blue Raspberry traces the crescendo and collapse of new love, savoring each gleaming shard of rock candy and broken glass along the way.

Originally from Spicewood, Texas, Kirby was living in Nashville when she started writing Blue Raspberry's title track, the first of the album's songs to take shape. "'Blue Raspberry' is the oldest song on the record. I began to write it a month or so before I realized, I think I’m queer," she says. "There’s a tradition of yearning in country love songs. I like the male yearning songs better, usually. I started writing 'Blue Raspberry,' and I was thinking about, if I was in love with a woman, what would I love about her? Especially if she was someone that I couldn’t touch, but that I was pining for. What would I be caught on? And I thought that I would probably be particularly charmed by the choices she made on how to look after she woke up in the morning. I thought about tackiness, and the ways that’s a dirty word. That’s where the title comes from -- loving someone for those choices, for the artificiality."

Blue Raspberry follows Kirby’s acclaimed debut album Cool Dry Place, which was also recorded in Nashville and released in February of 2021. While the songs on that record unfold amidst Kirby finding her voice, Blue Raspberry is a polished and confident sophomore effort that deepens the questions that bubbled through Cool Dry Place about how people can reach each other despite all the hazard zones where human connection caves in.

After realizing that her romantic interest in women went beyond the confines of a songwriting exercise, Kirby kept writing songs that sought to untangle that false binary between the real and the fake, to celebrate the spectacles people put on for each other when they're falling in and out of love. She committed herself completely to the work of drawing out these songs, often stealing away to her van to write immediately after playing an opening set while on a 2021 tour with Waxahatchee. For the first time since she started writing songs, Kirby stopped tamping down on her impulse to craft ornate, generously embellished music. "I felt less embarrassed about just wanting to write really gorgeous songs," she says. She started weaving more intricate chord progressions and melodies into her work, and in turn she felt emboldened to hold onto the more baroque flourishes of her lyrics without whittling them down into plainer lines.

Many of the songs that make up Blue Raspberry stemmed from a single page of lyrical fragments, words and phrases that kept their hold on Kirby even as she slipped them into multiple settings. Images repeat on different songs throughout the album: cubic zirconia gleaming at a woman's throat, the lab-grown substitute indistinguishable from earth-crushed diamonds; salt crystallizing as seawater dries on reddened skin; teeth that shine in a grin and then bite till they bruise. These refrains and reprises lend a tight narrative cohesion to the record, elevating its sharp queries into all the unlikely shapes love takes as it surges through you.

To underscore Blue Raspberry's lyrical themes, Kirby worked with her band to develop a newly lush sonic palette replete with orchestral gestures arranged by her friend Rowen Merrill. "I felt like I was intending to write love songs for the first time. Once I realized they were queer love songs and celebrating artificiality, I wanted them to sound like they were bidding for a spot in the wedding reception canon," she says. "It was more fun to just go for it than to try to restrain ourselves. Especially if we were just accepting the fact that we were trying to make objectively beautiful music, whatever that means."

Together with producers Alberto Sewald and Logan Chung, Kirby looked to albums like Andy Shauf's The Party and Lomelda's Hannah as models for Blue Raspberry's abundant but spacious gorgeousness. Piano and strings echo together on the gentle ballad "Salt Crystal," while scrapes of cello punctuate each heartbroken line of "Alexandria," a song about the dissolution of Kirby's first queer relationship and recorded live in one take. Cymbals and organs stagger across the offbeat "Drop Dead," one of the album's most playful songs that highlights the sly humor in Kirby's lyrics: "There’s no virgin territory for a body like hers." On the album's title track, Kirby sings trailed by a pitch-lowered echo of her own voice, her guitar chords hanging in the air like question marks. Her imagery seizes upon the bright, garish colors of mass-produced material, homing in on its sensory intensity while casting aside any judgment about its source. "Her eyes burn white as Styrofoam right into me," she sings, rendering a cheap, disposable substance into shocking magic.

"Why wouldn't that be enough?" Kirby sings throughout the album, a question that's never answered and never drops. Every attempt at love strains toward the idea of the real thing, that totalizing force that makes everything around it perfect forever. But if no one ever gets there, why wouldn't the straining itself suffice? Blue Raspberry shivers with the idea that the key to the treasure is itself the treasure -- even if it's plastic, even if its gold coating flakes off at your touch, even if despite all your searching you never find the lock.

02-03 Washington, D.C. - Songbyrd @
02-04 Carrboro, NC - Cat’s Cradle @
02-05 Asheville, NC - Eulogy @
02-07 Nashville, TN - The Blue Room at Third Man Records @
02-08 Atlanta, GA - The Masquerade @
02-09 Jackson, MS - Hal & Mal’s @
02-11 Dallas, TX - Sons of Hermann Hall @
02-13 Austin, TX - The Ballroom @
02-15 Tucson, AZ - Club Congress @
02-16 Santa Ana, CA - Constellation Room @
02-17 West Hollywood, CA - The Roxy Theatre @
02-18 San Francisco, CA - Rickshaw Stop @
02-19 Sacramento, CA - Goldfield Trading Post @
02-21 Portland OR - Polaris Hall @
02-22 Seattle, WA - Barboza @
02-24 Boise, ID - Shrine Basement @
02-25 Salt Lake City, UT - Kilby Court @
02-27 Denver, CO - Hi Dive @
02-29 Omaha, NE - Reverb Lounge @
03-01 Minneapolis, MN - 7th St. Entry @
03-02 Madison, WI - High Noon Saloon @
03-03 Chicago, IL - Lincoln Hall @
03-05 Hamtramck, MI - The Sanctuary @
03-06 Pittsburgh, PA - The Warhol Entrance Space @
03-07 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda’s @
03-08 New York, NY - Bowery Ballroom
@ with Allegra Krieger

Carrow · Oct 24, 2023

YES PLEASE

HeckYeahMatt · Oct 24, 2023

Cool Dry Place was one my favorites from 2021– very pumped for this

zhargfoul · Oct 24, 2023

nice

Serenity Now · Oct 25, 2023

Can’t wait

iCarly Rae Jepsen · Nov 28, 2023

phaynes12 · Dec 27, 2023

very excited for this one

Leftandleaving · Jan 4, 2024

Matt Chylak · Jan 4, 2024

Beautiful song

Carrow · Jan 5, 2024

Album is very good, folks - potentially even better than Cool Dry Place

sean_rugy · Jan 5, 2024

excited

DaydreamNation · Jan 8, 2024

“Cool Dry Place” has been a slow burner for me but it’s become one of my favorites of the decade. “Cubic Zirconia” has had the same effect—was lukewarm on it at first but it’s one of my favorite songs right now. Probably my favorite thing Katy’s recorded besides the Alex G cover haha.

Really excited for this but have mostly stayed away from the other pre release tracks

WornSoThin · Jan 29, 2024

Really enjoyed my first listen of this. Can see this being in my top 10 for AOTY already.

zhargfoul · Jan 29, 2024

this is a great record

Serenity Now · Jan 29, 2024

Yea this is at least as good as Cool Dry Place which is a big deal given how much I love that LP

Serenity Now · Jan 29, 2024

Outro to Drop Dead is plump goodness

phaynes12 · Jan 31, 2024

didn't love this at first but im hooked now

Matt Chylak · Jan 31, 2024

this is so, so good. "Wait Listen" is really doing it for me.

I also love how she made the title track the longest song and an obviously climactic closer and then threw it in the penultimate slot again.

Serenity Now · Jan 31, 2024

Matt Chylak said:

this is so, so good. "Wait Listen" is really doing it for me.

I also love how she made the title track the longest song and an obviously climactic closer and then threw it in the penultimate slot again.

I noticed the same thing. But I HATE that about Cool Dry Place tbh haha. It’s the only criticism

Matt Chylak · Jan 31, 2024

Serenity Now said:

I noticed the same thing. But I HATE that about Cool Dry Place tbh haha. It’s the only criticism

to me it's part and parcel with what makes her special as an artist: she doesn't do the obvious thing, melodically or lyrically or structurally.

Serenity Now · Feb 1, 2024

Matt Chylak said:

to me it's part and parcel with what makes her special as an artist: she doesn't do the obvious thing, melodically or lyrically or structurally.

no. it’s just wrong haha

Craig Manning · Feb 1, 2024

Thought this was boring on first listen, intriguing on third, and pretty magnificent on fifth. Funny how that happens sometimes.

radiodead · Feb 1, 2024

Same. Had it on repeat all morning. Pretty much in love with this.

you vandal · Feb 1, 2024

Matt Chylak said:

this is so, so good. "Wait Listen" is really doing it for me.

I also love how she made the title track the longest song and an obviously climactic closer and then threw it in the penultimate slot again.

Alexandria is longer by 7 seconds!

ItsAndrew · Mar 3, 2024

Seeing her live tonight! So excited!

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