New York-based singer/songwriter Katy Kirby will return next year with her sophomore album, Blue Raspberry, offering up in the interim its strident ending track, “Table.” The artist also just dropped another single titled “Party of the Century.”

Katry Kirby will be heading out on a U.S. headlining tour in early 2024, including a stop at the Constellation Room in Santa Ana on February 16th and The Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles on February 17th.

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Before Kirby’s move to the East Coast, she’d called Spicewood, Texas home. It was there she was raised in an evangelical Christian home and community — where the rigorous constraints that came with being homeschooled in such a fiercely patriarchal and suffocatingly religious environment took its toll. As a result, she primarily listened to worship music. But that all changed when she left home to attend Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ironically, it was there that the title track for what would become Kirby’s second album, Blue Raspberry trickled into existence, spurring a moment of queer revelation. One that takes inspiration from the romantic longing inherent to country love songs to fashion a wistfully intimate exploration of her freshly acknowledged attraction to women.

When her first EP Juniper and LP Cool Dry Place arrived she set aside “Blue Raspberry” — albeit momentarily. But the lush and gauzy music that resounded from both collections weaves similarly personal elucidations on life and love. In its opening ballad “Eyelids” she shares a prayer of tenderly loving intent that ends with her murmuring earnestly repeatedly: “If I was your man.”

From the jubilant twang of guitars and sonorous instrumentals that beam from “Peppermint” to the melodic razzle-dazzle that bursts within “Traffic!” — every song on Kirby’s first record confirms her as inhabiting a refreshingly innovative crossroads of folk-flecked indie-pop.

And when she’s not beguiling you with her radiant melodics she’s inscribing her lofty poetics on your heart: “Secret Language” entwines the opening lines of “Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen with her own sullen lyricism. At the same time “So Much Wine, Merry Christmas” joins the ranks of depressing holiday carols as one of the more heartwrenching ever to exist.

So far, Kirby has shared three previews of Blue Raspberry. The first was “Cubic Zirconia” — a shimmering ode to the aesthetically pleasing artifices of life that we secretly admire but scoff at in public. The imagined tension between what is “natural” and “authentic” exists as one of the thematic facets of this prismatic record.

Another is the recently released “Party of the Century” — a gentle folk song that radiates with soaring strings. The soft listen is both “sweet and sad,” as Kirby described in a social media post.

But Kirby’s October release, “Table” might be the strongest yet. The song serves as the album’s outro and exists as a confessed outlier compared to the rest of its songs. Submerged beneath a cacophonous grumble of guitars, Kirby explores the ghosts of her “god-haunted past life” — one in which she finds herself instructed and led by patriarchal forces. “He prepares a table for me, and / One of these days, I’ll have to sit down and eat,” she sings with teeth-gritting focus.

The accompanying music video directed by Lane Rodges envisions her cloistered in an almost comical puritanical outfit, staring down a wooden table that sits exaltingly at the center of an ornamental church. But as a blitz of guitars tears through Kirby’s pensive monotone, she raises the pickaxe she’s been dragging around with her the entire film and starts smashing the absolute shit out of the feeble piece of furniture.

The video ends with a compelling lesson: as delightful and cathartic blazing retribution may be, anger can’t be the only outcome. Instead, its final shot is a hopeful one that sees Kirby sitting inside a makeshift tent she’s built out of the table’s pieces and the tatters of her oppressive clothes.

Words: Steven Ward

Blue Raspberry, the new album from Katy Kirby, is out on January 26th via ANTI- Records. Pre-order it here.

See Katy Kirby at the Constellation Room in Santa Ana on February 16th and The Roxy Theatre in Los Angeles on February 17th.

Visit Katy Kirby on her website and Instagram to stay updated on new releases and tour announcements.

Katy Kirby tour
Feb 3 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd#
Feb 4 – Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle – Back Room#
Feb 5 – Asheville, NC @ Eulogy#
Feb 7 – Nashville, TN @ The Blue Room at Third Man Records#
Feb 8 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade – Purgatory#
Feb 9 – Jackson, MS @ Hal & Mal’s#
Feb 11 – Dallas, TX @ Sons of Hermann Hall#
Feb 13 – Austin, TX @ The Ballroom#
Feb 15 – Tucson, AZ @ Club Congress#
Feb 16 – Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room#
Feb 17 – West Hollywood, CA @ The Roxy Theatre#
Feb 18 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop#
Feb 19 – Sacramento, CA @ Goldfield Trading Post#
Feb 21 – Portland OR @ Polaris Hall#
Feb 22 – Seattle, WA @ Barboza#
Feb 24 – Boise, ID @ Shrine Basement#
Feb 25 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Kilby Court#
Feb 27 – Denver, CO @ Hi Dive#
Feb 29 – Omaha, NE @ Reverb Lounge#
Mar 1 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St. Entry#
Mar 2 – Madison, WI @ High Noon Saloon#
Mar 3 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall#
Mar 5 – Detroit, MI @ The Sanctuary#
Mar 6 – Pittsburgh, PA @ The Warhol Entrance Space#
Mar 7 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s#
Mar 8 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom

# with Allegra Krieger

Listen to “Table” the new single from Katy Kirby below!