Mal Devisa - Palimpsesa

“This is a bold record. It is so good to have her back.” – NPR

“Deja Carr’s voice is a force of gravity, an instrument of rare range and seemingly limitless capacity for empathy. When she howls, her vocals clip into the red, and her rapping jolts you straight awake.” – Pitchfork

“Deja Carr’s depth, musical range, and innate understanding of how to make her music spotlight itself help make her one of the most compelling new singer-songwriters in recent memory.” – The FADER

Reintroducing, Mal Devisa. The songwriting, liberation, and poetry project of the multifarious artist Deja Carr. At age 12, Carr began playing music when she and a group of friends started a band called Who’da Funk It? After five years of performing, writing, and recording, Carr began to learn bass as she compiled scraps of her forgotten songs. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, the solo project Mal Devisa was soon born out of the slanted basement walls and busted dusty kick drums.

Starting in 2014 and breaking through with 2016’s critically acclaimed Kiid, Mal Devisa’s work spans a self-made spectrum of sound from gravitic, soulful rock to soliloquy to unabashed hip-hop. Although known for her unmistakable, smouldering voice and loop-based, bass-forward compositions, Carr’s talents also extend to reaches of poetry and production, paralleled by aspirations to start both a youth foundation and Afrobeat Orchestra.

The sound on her new anthology album Palimpsesa (a play on the word “Palimpsest” – a piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for new text) is a maelstrom of genre-defiant magic that spans jazz, folk, hip-hop, and experimental forms. Carr’s lyrics are cleverly verbose, their delivery like lightning whispering into the haunting DIY spaces where Mal Devisa cut her teeth. Such boundless inspiration and style are central facets of Mal Devisa’s work, whose sonically and narratively unrestrained passages teem with empathy and liberatory visions for a better world.

Palimpsesa features some of Mal Devisa’s earlier songs plus a whole fresh batch of previously unreleased material, newly mixed and fully remastered. Lead singles “Old Intro” and “Skyline Arms-Reach Out” flip between two distinct sides of the Mal Devisa coin, with the former highlighting Carr’s effortless flow over a scrappy, boom-bap and the latter showcasing her sky soaring voice weaved in beautifully with art-pop atmospherics. It’s a completely stunning return.