New Virginity, the new record from Minneapolis, Minnesota singer-songwriter and producer Nat Harvie represents something of a hard reset. The album, which features guests appearances from the likes of Alan Sparhawk, Lala Lala and Merce Lemon, is a candid and triumphant display of the newfound freedom achieved when someone lets go of their past and affords themselves a fresh start. “There’s a magical realism to saying ‘I am a virgin again’,” Harvie describes. “It becomes true. This is the logic of the album: that one can reset their relationship to experience, to the sensual.”
This sense of rebirth is explored from a multitude of angles and viewpoints, a kaleidoscopic fusion of fact and fiction, memories of the past and imaginings of the future. From the vision of being the last person alive on opener ‘Sun’ (a slow-dawning meditation on place stripped of its history or context), to the anxious thoughts on the monotony of the present on ‘Cigapple’, Nat Harvie gathers handfuls of disparate threads and ties them together in intimate but widescreen pieces of electronic art pop. The result is something of a self portrait, a sonic and narrative collage that reveals a meta-story of personal evolution and queer personhood. ‘Shovel’ is perhaps the perfect example, a song which delves back further into Harvie’s past and grapples with childhood fears and their eventual defeat in order to summon up the courage to overcome more recent hurdles.
I was a child sleeping with a shovel in my bed
I was lining up Mom’s earrings on the floor
I was a germaphobe I could’ve been a murderer
Always stepping back letting anything unfold
The other standout is ‘Cheap’, which adds an air of elegiac Americana to its electronic foundations. Encapsulating the album as a whole, it’s a song that feels both fresh and bruised, sounding somehow at once intro- and extroverted, its visceral vulnerability delivered with carefree candour. Like when Harvie gets wistful when cutting their hair, lies about their age to impress potential suitors (“I tell strangers still I’m only 19 years old / So I can seem a little smarter than my age”), or admits to past cruelties, it’s all in search of that new start, that clean slate. “It’s not regressive, not revisionist,” Harvie concludes. “I am not winding back the clock of my life, I am bringing a *new* virginity to myself.”
New Virginity is out now via Boiled Records and is available from the Nat Harvie Bandcamp page.
