Eartheater, the solo project of Guardian Alien frontwoman Alexandra Drewchin, has shared her new album, RIP Chrysalis, via Hausu Mountain. It is the Queens-based psychedelic cyborg singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist's second full-length album released this year. You can stream it now, below.
As the title suggests, RIP Chrysalis is in a way an elegiac ode to metamorphosis. In the world of butterflies, to bid goodbye to one's chrysalis is to grow a pair of wings, break out of one's cocoon, and fly away into adulthood. On the album's second track, "Ecdysisphus," Drewchin references the album title in the spoken lyrics "rip this chrysalis," which suggests something more empowering than mournful. Either way, on this album Drewchin-as-Eartheater sounds galaxies beyond any sort of movement-restricting, let alone stagnant, caterpillar phase. Each song contains a metamorphosis, a sonic evolution in itself. As Factmag notes, "Drewchin jumps from baroque folk to futuristic electronics to field recording collages with a sincerity and organic flow that pulls you along through each chaotic phase." In this fluidity, RIP Chrysalis transcends genre tags and takes psychedelic folktronica to a new, weirder level.
Ahead of this release, Eartheater shared the album's eighth track, "Wetware." Much darker than Eartheater's debut album, Metalepsis, the dream-like, layered song set the tone for the rest of the record. That is not to say the artist's debut release was void of dreaminess. The video for "Put a Head in a Head" pretty aptly demonstrates the more lighthearted fairytale-like tone Eartheater achieved on Metalpsis. Check it out, below.
As Pitchfork reports, Metalpsis "felt like a digitized take on psych-folk, casting spells in javascript and lacing them together with silken guitar work" whereas RIP Chrysalis, as demonstrated by the unease evoked by "Wetware," feels like something out of Grimm's Fairytales. Listen to "Wetware" below.
You can buy a copy of RIP Chrysalis, available on your choice of pink cassette tape or pink usb necklace, via Eartheater's bandcamp page.
