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“My hero’s back,” Madeline Kenney sings on the second track of her newest effort, Kiss from the Balcony. In a sense, she means herself; made with friends Ben Sloan and Stephen Patota across just a few in-person studio sessions in Oakland, these tracks represent a culmination of Madeline’s musings on growth and resilience reaching back years, brought to life through this generative and vibrant collaboration. Close listeners can hear the breadth of stylistic elements and themes carried through from various eras of her work, which all come together in a cohesive and timeless record.

In two week-long intensive sessions, the three collaborators grew these nine songs from fragments, sketches, and seeds. With a background in experimental percussion and sound design, Ben Sloan brings an electronic sound to Kenney’s writing; Stephen Patota provides ingenious guitar melodies throughout and grounds the project in acoustic elements. Kiss from the Balcony was originally intended to be an EP, but the sessions brought forth such fruitful ideation and play that the project was expanded to a full length album. It sits in Madeline’s discography as a thematic and musical progression that sees her iterate on ideas about love and explore new sonic motifs through her work with Patota and Sloan.

Much of Kiss from the Balcony is a meditation on modern relationships, a feminist and utterly human contemplation of power and who holds it. “Hereditary backward leaning,” she describes in ‘Slap,’ of the female condition; “But no-one ever likes to see the girls break down / So they keep it to the bathroom floor” she sings in the rapturous opener, ‘Scoop.’ While the songs are shrouded in metaphor, the ubiquity of heartbreak and resilience decode much of the internal conflict Kenney depicts. The album sees her recognize the precarity and peculiarity of life and take it by the horns, realizing she controls her own narrative:


She explores the relationships between joy and suffering, choosing to see them as inseparable, two sides of a single coin. “It’s never over / When will they love me?” Kenney asks on ‘They Go Wide,’ describing her positionality both as a woman in relationship and as an indie artist in the modern music industry.

A playful hopefulness pervades the record, providing a sense of revelation in the journey throughout, Kenney’s radical acceptance of life as it is like a lyrical tongue out at the absurd.

In the quiet surrounding the pandemic, Madeline Kenney made sonic sketches in the basement studio she shared with her then-partner. She arranged phrases that called her—the sharp knife of a synth cutting a path along a blooming arpeggio, drums stuttering firm and tight. Working this way, she amassed a collection of songs she had no particular aims for. Some formed her 2021 EP Summer Quarter, others languished.

But in 2022, Kenney’s partner left suddenly and without warning, plunging her into the solitary act of untangling what happened. In the wake of her ensuing depression, she revisited these songs and found in them something prescient. She’d already laid the foundation for A New Reality Mind.

That her relationship’s end came without warning is only half true, though. The warnings were in the feelings and fears that inspired Kenney’s critically-acclaimed third album, Sucker’s Lunch (2020), which was co-produced by Jenn Wasner (Flock of Dimes) and centered around the idea of flinging oneself freely into the seemingly-assured destruction of new love, come what may.

If sonically Sucker’s Lunch was letting yourself be pulled into the warm bath of a good story, A New Reality Mind reflects the harsh light of truth coming to break the spell. But as sobering as morning light can be, there’s brilliance to it, too. To see in the clarity of day is a gift. A revolution. Rather than reckoning with love lost, the songs on A New Reality Mind grapple with the self that chose to fall. “I guess I only needed to look twice / Reflected in my attitude, my constant compromise,” Kenney sings on “Red Emotion,” the musical landscape screeching and gasping around her observations of how she made herself small to keep the dream of love alive.

These notions of sight and vision pervade the record as Kenney stands before the infinity mirror of selves she’s been to preserve bonds in her life. On “I Drew a Line,” Kenney contends with the stories she’s told herself to keep plodding along, and the way those stories shape her perceived reality. She invokes John Berger’s Ways of Seeing—“Everything around the image is part of its meaning,” we hear him say. “Everything around it confirms and consolidates its meaning.” Here, Kenney isn’t interested in shaming herself for being carried away by the fantasies of the heart, but rather in investigating the unavoidably human propensity to do so. “I, like everyone else, am muddling through my most ordinary disaster of a life,” she acknowledges, a sentiment which reverberates through album opener “Plain Boring Disaster.” “I don’t need to start again,” she sings at the song’s close. “But I can change when it ends.” We may all be doomed to repetitive, ordinary heartbreaks, Kenney realizes, but at least we can cultivate a capacity to witness our missteps and build new realities for ourselves.

This is Kenney’s most expansive work, while also her most solitary. Produced and recorded alone in her basement, these songs are manifestations of what it feels like to be transformed by pain. Textures collide and collude; sonic ornaments emerge and dissipate capriciously; saxophones soar untamed, as on the 80s pop elegy to self-sacrifice, “Reality Mind”. These songs beg you to dance, then pull the rug out from under you once you’ve caught the beat, leaving you dizzy like the whiplash of love’s end.

But in the propulsive power of A New Reality Mind, there’s also acceptance, self-forgiveness, and a willingness to move forward into life, with all its ways of making a sucker of you. “That way of living, I’m over it,” Kenney declares of the habits that hold her back on “Superficial Conversation”. “I do not need to be reminded of what I did,” she assures, the song opening wide and beaming, like a smile expanding to taste a new breath of air.

Produced by Jenn Wasner of Wye Oak. LP is on coloured coke bottle green vinyl + inclues download code and 12x12' lyric sheet/ liner note insert.

Madeline will be on tour throughout the UK and Europe this Autumn.

'Building from understated beauty to dense guitar theatrics. It reminds me of Chicago circa '93 as remembered in a dream — a little bit of Liz Phair 'Exile In Guyville' - rendered in soft-focus with the graceful confidence of a young master. ' STEREOGUM

In January of 2018, five months after the release of her debut album Night Night at the First Landing, Madeline Kenney traveled from Oakland, California to the woods outside of Durham, North Carolina to record her sophomore album with a new collaborator, Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner.

The choice was a conscious decision to explore new methodology in writing, recording, production and even genre. Perfect Shapes sees Kenney leaping headfirst into fresh and adventurous territory, largely eschewing conventional rock structures in favor of theme and melody. Its ten songs are full of surprises big and small - from vibrant synth lines to taut bass figures and subtly modulated vocals - that instead of feeling fussed over, reveal Kenney's penchant for elegant and abstract composition.

Kenney's 2017 debut, Night Night at the First Landing, was a guitar-centric rock album, produced by friend and collaborator Chaz Bear of Toro Y Moi, Perfect Shapes leans on the foundational pieces of Night Night - fuzzed-out guitar tones, coy wordplay and Kenney's notably strong voice - but with an unconventional approach that allows them to bloom, reincarnated. Perfect Shapes marks Wasner's first foray into producing another artist's work and is permeated by the pair's collaborative spirit. Both Wasner and Kenney play multiple instruments on the record, and engineered the session alongside Kenney's touring percussionist, Camille Lewis.

An eagerness to explore and experiment is apparent from start to finish, as Kenney and Wasner weave endless sonic curve balls into the arrangements. From the delightfully warped percussion on opening track 'Overhead' to the burbling synths on the R&B-tinted 'The Flavor of the Fruit Tree' and the left-field trumpet solo in 'Your Art,' these rich and inventive ideas echo Yo La Tengo's everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mentality, as well as the surging soundscapes of Tame Impala and Wye Oak at their most impressionistic. Lead single "Cut Me Off" is a surprise of its own - the most pop-forward song Kenney has written yet. 'Bad Idea,' finds her balancing fragility as foil; later, 'I Went Home' manages to evoke both frustration and affection in a single breath.

The complex and open-ended questions that lay at the core of Perfect Shapes mark Kenney's arrival into a hard-hitting reflective space: How do you love another when it hurts to do so What is the physical limit to which one can carry the emotions of others How does a modern female artist reckon with the expectations demanded of her femininity Yet for all the notes of doubt and fear that Kenney raises, she delivers each song with confidence and poise, grounded by the pointedly laid and surging soundscape.

Kenney has always had a penchant for curiosity and experimentation. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, she began studying classical piano and dance in kindergarten, and grew to believe her future lay in modern dance choreography. Not one to be tied to a singular pursuit, however, Kenney took a hard left in college, studying Interpersonal Neurobiology and supporting herself with a career in baking. Music remained a constant however, and after moving to the Bay Area in 2013, Kenney quickly found footing in the supportive arts community in Oakland. There, she met and began collaborating with Chaz Bear (Toro Y Moi), which led to the production of her Signals EP and later her debut album, Night Night at the First Landing. Both releases were received with great critical acclaim, and saw Kenney exploring the sounds within her self-proclaimed twang-haze genre, defined by cathartic fuzz breakdowns and lyrical sensitivity.

Influenced by the social and political climate of the modern
world, MOTSA’s debut album, ‘Perspectives’, is inspired by his
acute awareness of modern society’s dependence on
technology and the social media bubble also responsible for
the civic polarisation seen globally. The 11 track album takes
the listener on an emotional journey with dark, yet hopeful,
detailed compositions, each representing their own personal
story. The title “Perspectives” refers to a problem we all face:
differing perspectives of the same situation, which in turn
leads to conflict, be it in personal relationships, families and
even political discussions globally. With individuals and
groups often losing perspective in disagreements, MOTSA’s
debut LP calls for more empathy, highlighting our current
trajectory of an ego-driven society. Encouraging listeners to
spend less time behind computer screens and more time
outside in nature to broaden our horizons and reflect on
human decisions, many of the album’s samples were recorded
from MOTSA’s own environment. Using the sounds of children playing in the sand on a Balearic beach, crickets in the grass,
or the ambient soundscapes of bells recorded from his
father’s apartment in Moscow, the producer also recorded and
sampled his own voice to create distant, choir-like melodies in
many of the tracks. The artist’s signature sound – a soulful yet
driven harmonic blend – continues to propel the multi-talented
artist to the highest acclaim into 2019 and beyond.