It has been just over two years since KLOF named Cinder Well‘s Cadence an Artist of the Month feature, hailing Amelia Baker as one of the most consummate songwriters around. She now returns with the announcement of a new album, A Blooming Body, due July 17th via Hen House Studios and recorded with Harlan Steinberger. Pre-orders are open, and the lead single and accompanying video While the Womb Screams Silently is out today.
In our 2023 interview, Baker spoke of wanting to “evolve and be flexible to newer sounds and approaches to recording.” A Blooming Body picks up that thread and pulls it further. This time she has been just as involved in production and mixing as in the writing, and the supporting cast has expanded significantly: horns from Amy Sanchez (Kendrick Lamar, Bruce Springsteen, Kamasi Washington, Florence and the Machine), synths from Bell Witch’s Dylan Desmond, bass from Greg Cohen (Tom Waits, John Zorn, Laurie Anderson) and Pete Olynciw, drums from Phillip Rogers, and additional vocals from C.P.N. Hollywell.
The single takes its cue from Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. As Baker explains: “This song is inspired by the movie ‘Portrait of A Lady On Fire’ from director Céline Sciamma. In the film, a woman is arranged to be wed, and because of her intense resistance to the situation, a painter is commissioned to secretly paint her wedding portrait without her knowing. The song is about listening to your inner knowing, which often screams loudly but is ignored for the sake of conforming — constantly trying to break out of the restraints and projections of patriarchy while stumbling over new ones and internalized ones along the way — ‘pulling at an endless thread of thistle — whose hooks and briars they catch things you thought you couldn’t miss em / while the womb screams silently for you to listen’.”
Where Cadence opened up the gothic palette of earlier Cinder Well records into something warmer, A Blooming Body circles back toward a different kind of heaviness — one rooted, Baker says, in the “harsh mundaneity that life can carry.” The album shimmers with clarity even as it plunges into heady depths beneath its acoustic surface; restraint, she suggests, can be every bit as eerie as loudness. The album also follows Baker composing the theme and score for the popular BBC series Small Prophets, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook.
‘While the Womb Screams Silently’ is the first single from Cinder Well’s forthcoming album ‘A Blooming Body’ releasing July 17th from Hen House Studios.
Pre-Save: https://henhousestudios.ffm.to/aqp5itt9qo
Pre-Order: https://www.henhousestudios.com/home-store/p/cinder-well-a-blooming-body-vinyl-lp