Niecy Blues - Exit Simulation [CD]

Kranky

£18.34

Format: CD
Catalogue No.: KRANK240
Barcode: 796441824021
Release Date: 01 Dec 2023
Genre: Ambient/Singer-Songwriter/ R&B/Downtempo Gospel

South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: “I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves... whole days roll by, forgetting about the body.”

Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations – often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure – “the permission to imagine leaving.”

Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album’s mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, “talking myself off a ledge.”

The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: “My first experience with ambient music was church – slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don’t believe, you feel something.” 

Press for Cry EP:
“A mesmerising new three-song EP which veers between barely-there ambience and something altogether more soulful.” GoldFlakePaint

Tracklisting:
1. 1111 2. The Nite B4 3. U Care 4. Violently Rooted 5. Exit Simulation 6. Exits 7. Soma 8. Messages From Above 9. Lament 10. Violently Rooted Reprise 11. The Architect 12. Analysis Paralysis 13. Cascade