Cat Clyde – All The Black

Hailing from Stratford, Ontario, songwriter Cat Clyde first emerged in 2015 with debut full-length album, Ivory Castanets. The record highlighted Clyde’s distinctive style that blends traditional and contemporary elements and encompasses everything from folk and rock to blues and jazz, leading to a sound that swaggers with attitude and smoulders with smoky emotion.

Earlier this month, Clyde returned with a brand new two-song single, All the Black, a release that further develops her sound. The title track forms from a slow shuffle, Clyde’s vocals shaking themselves from a sultry croon into something more urgent. As such, the tone is pitched somewhere between yearning and dangerous, the loneliness of the track’s restraint hiding a more ominous undercurrent, some wildness that lurks beneath.

This may be killing us
But at least it kills the pain
If i could soak up all the black
I would soak up all the black

The second song, ‘Anymore’, leans more into a country aesthetic, the wistful acoustic twang lifted by Clyde’s impressive vocals and soon building into a compelling rhythm. Thematically, the song is lifted straight out of the country canon, a retrospective dwelling on loss that stirs with a fatalistic, almost playful energy. Heartbreak as experienced by cowboys, solitude as a gratifying thing, a source of self-mythology.

I lay here weeping
while you’re sleeping like a baby
You know I’m leaving
But you’re just the same

I watch you dreaming
Hoping its me your seeing
But I know you don’t need me
Anymore

All The Black is out now and available from the Cat Clyde Bandcamp page., where you can also find her debut full-length, Ivory Castanets.

Photo by Strummer Jasson