Kathryn Joseph has announced details of her fourth album WE WERE MADE PREY. due for release on 30 May via Rock Action Records. The first single from the record is available to stream and download – listen to ‘HARBOUR’, below.
With brooding textures housing Joseph’s twisting, confessional voice, it sounds austere and pulsing yet tender, vivid and haunting. All consuming, contemplating what offers comfort and what offers pain, it tries and fails to look trauma in the eye, hoping for the obscured warm light in the distance.
How do we find our way when intuition fails us? When the lighthouse goes dark, who is to blame? Here, Joseph and producer Lomond 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.” It sounds like an evolution in Jospeh’s sound, her haunting outstanding vocals and vivid couplets juxtaposed with bleeping atmospheres it has echoes of Portishead or Everything but the Girl, yet uniquely it is still Kathryn Joseph.
“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.
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 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.”
Kathryn Joseph’s fourth album is both a reaction to and a 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.”
Photo credit Marilena Vlachopoulou
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.
Kathryn Joseph tour dates
MAY:
10th: Focus Wales @ St Giles Parish Church, Wrexham
18th: Barrowland Ballroom, Glasgow (supporting Mogwai)
