Anyone paying attention to indie music in the early 2000s would likely have come across Carissa’s Wierd, one of the premier slowcore/chamber rock acts of the period who won acclaim through their ability to make melancholy something almost comforting, as though gloom was a blanket to be wrapped inside. Adopting the moniker S, founding member Jenn Champion took such sensibilities into her solo music, pushing the style towards increasingly poppy directions to capture the queer experience in all of its glimmering heartbreak.
To be released under her own name via Gay Forever, The Last Night of Sadness is a brand new album from Jenn Champion which feels like the culmination of everything before it. A product of every sadness and consolation, as well as every year spent honing her craft. The most confident record she has ever written and as a result the most honest. And if we’ve learnt anything across Champion’s oeuvre, honest means sad.
Because while the title might suggest a certain conquering or closure, The Last Night of Sadness is in fact marked by the absence of both. A dread runs through the record, a too-keen awareness of mortality which comes with a far sharper edge than Carissa Wierd’s enveloping sorrow. Champion is here to open up her chest so that we might see the real picture within. Comes to terms with life in all of its messy, fragile truth. Suffering is real and constant. To be alive is a miracle in itself.
Lead single ‘Famous’ positions this dread at the forefront, holding it at arm’s length so as to better take in its contours. “As an artist sometimes it feels like fame and success are used interchangeably and over the course of my career in music I’ve seen how fame can bring with it all this money and opportunity but is also a gilded cage,” Champion explains. “This song is one that just came to me on a run one morning as I looked out over the city and I had to pull out my phone and start writing. I’ve gone through a reset of my priorities in the last few years and this song and this album are about the journey through existential dread that has me where I am now.”
The Last Night of Sadness is out on the 13th October via Gay Forever and you can pre-order it now.
