NEW ALBUM SPIRITUALS
OUT SEPTEMBER 9 ON LITTLE JERK RECORDS
Portrait credit: Frank Ockenfels
Santigold has shared the dynamic new single ‘Shake‘ from her fourth album Spirituals, due out September 9 via Little Jerk Records. Produced by SBTRKT, this song is a celebration of human resilience.
Santi shares, “‘Shake’ is one of those songs that was just floating around me for the taking. What I mean is that there are some songs that basically write themselves, and all you have to do as the artist is be open enough to reach out and pull it in and say thank you. When that happens I am always so grateful because it’s like the universe just handed me a gem. I sit down to write and as soon as I open my mouth the song just pours out. In this instance SBTRKT had sent me several tracks he’d been working on, and this one stood out because it sounded so different from anything I’d ever heard from him, and also so unlike anything I had ever done before. I literally stepped in front of the mic, and opened my mouth and said “ooh – hoo, shake, shake shake!”, and the whole rest of the melody poured out from there. And then when I sat down to finish the lyrics, they came just as quick. I can’t say this song is about one thing, as much as it’s about a feeling. It’s about flow, about riding the ebb and flows of life, it’s about rolling with it, moving through it, letting it all move through you. And it’s about the feeling in that moment when you feel life flowing through you, the rapture of it all. It’s about our resilience as humans, and our ability to keep rising back up in the face of hardship and moving forward.”
The accompanying video for ‘Shake’ is one of Santigold’s most daring visual statements. It is a music video that is also a performance art piece. She says, “For this piece, I was inspired by the images of the civil rights protesters being pounded with high-pressure water hoses, turned on them by the authorities, during their peaceful protests. The strength and fortitude that it took for them, many just teenagers and young adults, to endure what they did and keep going, is monumental. This video is an homage to them, in which I try to power through singing this song while enduring the pain of a high-pressure water hose.”
‘Shake’ follows the release of ‘High Priestess‘, ‘Nothing‘ and ‘Ain’t Ready‘ from Spirituals. A fiercely innovative artist always looking to pioneer her own path, Spirituals is the first Santigold album released on her own label Little Jerk Records and it will be distributed by Secretly Distribution. The album captures the feeling of surviving in the modern world while elevating yourself to new places. It was mostly recorded during the 2020 lockdown and features producers and contributors: Rostam, Boys Noize, Dre Skull, P2J, Nick Zinner, SBTRKT, JakeOne, Illangelo, Doc McKinney, Psymun, Ricky Blaze, Lido, Ray Brady, and Ryan Olson.
Since her last full-length release, Santigold has also engaged new ways to express and release her ideas, allowing her greater range to be even truer to her creative intentions on her own terms. She created Spirituals as a multisensory experience that includes not only the music and video vignettes, but new ways of sharing her visual art, forthcoming small-batch natural skincare products, and a tea collection; the products bearing the same brand name, Spirituals. She will also be releasing a new podcast in which she interviews other artists and visionaries around some of the same themes explored in her music. Santigold has other literary, film and product lines in the works as well. “I want to continue branching out into all forms of art,” she says. “And I’m really excited to let my music take me to new places.”
While taking yourself to new places is core to Santigold’s outlook at this point in her impressive career, she has always been an artist who has charted new paths in the world of pop music and beyond, breaking down barriers of genre along the way, further cementing her as an essential artist when surveying the last two decades of popular culture at large.
