Dealing with grief in all its many guises, Anna Smyrk unveils her album Spectacular Denial.
Produced by Anna Laverty (Courtney Barnett, Nick Cave), Spectacular Denial is a glittering collection of songs ranging from heartbreakingly vulnerable folk ballads to 90s grunge bangers, created in the wake of Anna unexpectedly losing her father.
Spectacular Denial's songs range from hopeful to thoughtful to despairing and back again; the album mirrors the unpredictability of grief rather than a straight line from grief to acceptance. Woven amongst moments from her recent years, the focus single ‘Crying in an Internet Cafe’ offers a more irreverent moment, inspired by Anna’s backpacking in her early 20s, when she was so far away from home and needed a way to put feelings into words.
Spectacular Denial Tracklist:
1. Skin Thinner
2. Garden-Variety Grief
3. This is a Drill
4. Sit Down in My Shadow
5. The Future Conditional
6. Keep Up is Bringing Me Down
7. Crying in an Internet Cafe
8. See It Everywhere
9. This is Going to Get Worse
10. Line by Line
11. I Don’t Believe in Heaven
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The album opens with ‘Skin Thinner’, a reminder to open yourself to all emotional experiences, even when it hurts. It moves through ‘Garden-Variety Grief’, the cathartic track that gave us the first glimpse of the record and inspired her Community Garden shows, to the foggy state of denial in ‘This is a Drill’. She sits down with fellow songwriter Luna Keller to marvel at the disconnect between one's own internal darkness while in a world of natural beauty in ‘Sit Down in My Shadow.’ ‘The Future Conditional’ is the album's grunge rock moment, followed by gnarly synths paired with soft vocal layers in ‘Keep Up is Bringing Me Down’. With a few funny anecdotes in ‘Crying in an Internet Cafe’, Anna deftly balances moments of lightness and darkness. While most of the album was recorded live in the studio with the band, ‘See It Everywhere’ was an exception, a song built slowly, layer by layer. On ‘This is Going to Get Worse, Anna references a children’s book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. She says, "I think there’s a perfect metaphor for grief in that book - the idea that you can’t go under it, over it, or around it, you just have to go through it, and talks about it in ‘Line by Line’, written on an aeroplane bathroom floor. The album closes with a final ode for her father in ‘I Don’t Believe in Heaven’; the hardest and loveliest song for Anna to play live, the moment she feels closest to him.
As Anna began some of these songs live, she saw how audiences connected with them and were permitted to sit with their own losses. “I’ve loved talking with people after shows and finding these moments of solidarity. Grief can feel like a very isolating thing, but there’s something about these songs that seems to make people feel a little less alone. It became clear pretty quickly that I wanted to record them and get them out into the world.”
Anna Smyrk's debut album Spectacular Denial is avaliable to stream now via Community Music.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN
CLICK HERE TO WATCH VIDEO FOR SKIN THINNER
