Katy Kirby - Blue Raspberry

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Katy Kirby’s ‘Blue Raspberry‘ Savours the Artificial – Exclaim! (8/10)

Katy Kirby: The Best of What’s Next – Paste

“Katy Kirby is on another level right now … “Party of the Century” is pensive and sublime and harmonic, as the largely acoustic arrangement—packed with violin and folkloric percussion—establishes itself, immediately, as one of the best Kirby has ever proctored.” – Paste Magazine, “Party of the Century” #39 in Best 100 Songs of 2023

“ ‘Blue Raspberry’ couldn’t get here any sooner; it’s going to be the party of the century indeed.” – Uproxx

“Just as the track’s title references the synthesized diamond, the song finds Kirby dissecting all of the ways a person becomes who they are — and how, in a relationship, a partner hopefully learns to love them.” – Consequence on “Cubic Zirconia”

“ “Table” mixes intimate storytelling with bold, fuzzy electric guitar” – American Songwriter

Katy Kirby is sharing the album track “Hand to Hand” featuring a lyric video of Kirby creating a wedding make-up tutorial when the theme of your wedding is “getting ready to make a bad decision.” Listen and watch the clip below.

“I wrote this at a moment I was witnessing the gory breakdown of several relationships/couples all at the same time,” Kirby explains. “I don’t really want to invoke the word “heteropessimism” here, but I guess it’s about something like it, or just about commitment in general. It all seems like such an incredibly risky idea? I’m feeling less dark about it these days but I also fell in love with someone recently, so have tried to think about it less.”

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. 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. Many of the songs 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.

“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.

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