Description
Daughter of Swords is the solo project of North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig (they/she), who has also released music with bands Mountain Man and The As. Their solo debut, Dawnbreaker, was a hushed folk record released in 2019; in the years since, Sauser-Monnig found a new understanding of self, personally and musically. Across the last several years, Daughter of Swords music has grown thornier, an unpredictable and knotty tangle of technicolor synths, heady guitar, bubbling rhythms, a sheen enveloping songs about raw human intensity writ large crushes, desire, anger, alienation, the horrors of late-stage capitalism, the cascading paradigm shifts it seems were all hurtling toward. Enter Alex, Daughter of Swords sinewy new record. Recorded at Bettys (Sylvan Essos studio), Alex was built out by Sauser-Monnigs longtime friends/collaborators Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man, The As), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso, Made of Oak), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia). Theres a sharp cerebral tension between the stories at the core of these songs and theelectrifying, playful buoyancy of the sound, the wink with which Sauser-Monnig can deliver a withering observation. Reckoning with pleasure-seeking, boundary-breaking, and their place in the world, Alex heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet. A reassessment of inner systems, and relationships of all sorts with art and creativity, with other humans, with gender happened in tandem with Sauser-Monnigs interrogation of the late-capitalist culture that makes life for working artists an inequitable grind.
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