We first covered Katy Kirby back in 2018 with the release of Juniper, an EP on which “happiness and sadness is not some stark binary,” we wrote, “but more the various shades of a rich emotional environment, one so diverse and fertile that the taxonomic differences between each fade into obscurity.” Then again earlier this year when she released a collaborative album with Karima Walker, Among Horses III, on Son Canciones. February sees the release of her debut full-length record, Cool Dry Place, on Keeled Scales.
‘Traffic!’ again deals in the “duality between surface-level joviality or tenderness and the underlying pain and darkness,” that we previously described, upbeat and melodic indie pop instrumentation supporting Kirby’s subtly vocoded vocals. The song explores the spectrum of suffering, taking issue with the habit of lamenting every relative nick and graze of ordinary life when far greater pain and trauma exists in the world. The thought arose after Kirby grew close to someone “objectively cooler and hotter” than herself, and found their habit of reacting badly to the most mundane setbacks immensely irritating. “It seemed so obvious that he’d been spared from much of human suffering’s broad spectrum,” she says:
The song turned into something like a meditation on what counts as actual injury [..] What right do I have (nevermind the person I wrote this to, or everyone else) to self-interest, when the damage I sustain generally seems to roll right off me, like a cute lil’ Wile E Coyote running ‘round in the twilight of democracy, being absolutely fucking fine?
well it’s easy for you to say
standing there with your future
all aligned
but it isn’t for you to say
when you get off easy every time
nobody has it better than you
The video, directed and shot by Noah Hanson with art direction by Hunt Pennington and Tyler Squires, captures these twin energies—the playful, almost slapstick style elucidating the absurdity of the subject matter.
Cool Dry Place will be released by Keeled Scales on the 19th February and you can pre-order it now from the Katy Kirby Bandcamp page.
Photo by Jackie Lee Young