Next year sees Sara Rachele return with Heartstrings, a brand new album released via Ropeadope Records. Recorded with between London, Brooklyn and Rachele’s hometown of Little 5 Points in Atlanta, Georgia, and with a wide array of collaborators and friends, the album’s diversity is apparent in its very essence. With elements of pop, folk, Americana and jazz all comingling, the songs are tied together by a sixties retro-polish, casting Rachele as the archetypal troubadour—a figure always moving, always searching, never content in one place for too long.

Single ‘Go South’ encapsulates this aesthetic. A rich country rock jam carved from the Americana tradition, equal parts smouldering emotion and heart-on-the-sleeve vulnerability. Though it is far more polished than anything on Scorpio Sun, the mood is as stark as ever, Rachele’s croon emerging through the brooding bluesy style with a hard won wisdom.

Get wise or go south
New York will spit you out
Get tough or just get out
Get wise
Get wise or go

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Late last month saw Sara Rachele release a brand new record, Scorpio Sun. The album swaps out the smoked spotlights and moonbeams of its sister in favour of something both sharper and more raw.  There might be elements of a crooned ballad on opening track ‘Still Alive’, but they now share the stage with country and rock influences, and the shadowed romance of the vocals is replaced by a steely ferocity.

The tone is apparent across Scorpio Sun, the songs finding Sara Rachele earnest and energetic and furious too. Such as on the growing squall of ‘Terry Richardson’, staring down the myth of the tortured genius and the misogyny it has justified for too long. Or the portentously brooding ‘Dead Squirrel in the Tractor Pool’, a distant thunderhead of a track that threatens to unload its violence from afar, possessing that uncanny Southern Gothic sensibility that makes the banal suddenly Biblical.

This sense of simmering energy is present on many tracks, from the slow and moody ‘Hollywood’ to the volatile country rock of ‘Dugan’s Doorstop’, but this is always balanced by a pervasive melancholy too. Songs like ‘What A Friend You’ll Be’ and ‘Lover Can’t You Just Get Over It (Love Me Like You Love Her)’ are loaded with heartbroken hindsight, the kind of longing that colours every sunset and holds tight through time. The aesthetic is captured best with Sara Rachele’s take on the African-American spiritual ‘Michael Row The Boat Ashore’, where sadness and loss coalesce into a beauty of their own, and conjure the possibility of something better on the other side.

Scorpio Sun is out now and you can get it from the Sara Rachele Bandcamp page.

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