Kathryn Joseph today announces her fourth album WE WERE MADE PREY. due for release on 30 May via Rock Action Records. A first single from the record is available to stream and download - listen to HARBOUR. now.
WE WERE MADE PREY. dances on the knife-edge: of action versus inaction, of want versus wanting, of self-fulfilment versus shame. Continuing her creative partnership with for you who are the wronged producer Lomond Campbell, recording took place in the remote Black Bay Studios on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides last winter.
“What you hear on the record is not how I heard it at first,” she says. “The songs were angry, but they were angry in a small way. Until Lomond added all this beautiful noise, then all of a sudden they were angry in a much bigger way, in an exciting way, and so full of want. Everything he did was perfect. I’m so unbelievably lucky.”
“HARBOUR.” is Joseph’s personal favourite of the new songs, swimming in the delirium of choice and consequence. How do we find our way when intuition fails us? When the lighthouse goes dark, who is to blame? Here, Joseph and Campbell are locked in a slithering dance of pulsing intensity. “There’s something cold about it,” she says, delightedly. “I feel the same way about it as I feel about metal, like bridges and wind turbines. I want to lick it. I want to feel it in my mouth.
“Are you a harbour or a half-broken bone?” Joseph sings as if staring into a cracked mirror and piercing right through it. WE WERE MADE PREY. leaves no dark thought unturned, no comfort left unchallenged.
Kathryn Joseph’s fourth album is both a reaction to and reprieve for the animal within. Eleven songs that accept her whole being, with all its hunger, lust and rage, and its devastating tenderness too. Through her hunt for answers to punishing choices, “the kind that can absolutely fuck up your life,” the Glasgow-based singer/songwriter has come out the other side with something new to say.
“It feels like I am definite in this album. It’s angrier and stronger,” she explains. “I was so sure when I was writing these songs that I had to let go of something, but then, of course, as soon as you don’t have something you want it again. That’s basically what this record is. Trying to work out the truth of things, and making quite a big mess while doing it, with a lot of blood on the table.”
Joseph’s pursuit of truth is the red thread that winds through each of her albums. It’s there among the agonising beauty of bones you have thrown me and blood i have spilled, her Scottish Album of the Year Award-winning debut. It’s there, too, in 2018’s from when i wake the want is, sewn into the primal grief and grasping of the songs. And it made its presence felt again in 2022’s for you who are the wronged, Joseph’s powerful exploration of abuse in all its twisted shapes and guises, acclaimed for its “luminous brand of minimalism” (Pitchfork) and as “an outright masterpiece of emptiness and full-to-bursting-ness at the same time” (The Quietus).
Kathryn Joseph tour dates
10 May - Focus Wales @ St Giles Parish Church, Wrexham
18 May - Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow (supporting Mogwai)
