Laura Mvula has released her new album ‘Pink Noise’.
The ‘Green Garden’ hitmaker is back with her first record since signing to Atlantic Records.
The collection includes the singles ‘Got Me’, ‘Safe Passage’ and ‘Church Girl’, the latter of which is about “basking in the light of knowing [her] true self.”
Speaking of the track, she said: “I am not my story. For so long I identified as the things that happen in my life, the things I do, good or bad. I’m letting go of this mind-made ‘me’. I’m coming home to myself beyond the realm of form. I am not the thoughts in my head, or the things I achieve, or the shape of my haircut. I no longer ‘dance with the devil’ on my back. I’m basking in the light of knowing my true self, the deeper ‘I’.”
‘Safe Passage’ marked the start of a new era for the 33-year-old singer-songwriter, who started looking for teaching jobs after being made to feel like she was “too old for pop”.
Laura – who was abruptly dropped by her former record label via email in 2017- explained: “Three years ago I knew I’d made a promise I couldn’t keep. After two albums, I was sure I had nothing to say. I felt like ‘Sing To The Moon’ was just a happy accident anyway so I looked for teaching posts in Hackney. I began to accept that I was ‘too old to be pop’ and ‘no longer relevant enough to breakthrough’. I couldn’t be bothered publicly ‘failing again’. I sought comfort in deeply patient friends and family. I practiced feeling that feeling – the need to be safe, the need to escape. I fuelled up on my favourite music of the past and spent days, weeks, months hovered over my hardly-a-home-studio (a laptop, midi keyboard and USB mic). And then, sat in my PJ’s, on a rainy Sunday afternoon, a new chapter was born – ‘Safe Passage’ was here.”
The 10-track collection is heavily influenced by the 1980s and her “most honest and unapologetic” album yet.
She added: “This is the album I always wanted to make. Every corner is made warm with sunset tones of the 80s. I was born in 1986. I came out of the womb wearing shoulder pads. I absorbed the dynamism of the 80s aesthetic right from my first moments on this planet. Wrestling with identity seems to be one of the rites of passage of the established artist. Making ‘Pink Noise’ felt like the most violent of emotional wrestling matches. It took three years of waiting and waiting and fighting and dying and nothingness and then finally an explosion of sound. As if it was always here this record is my most honest and unapologetic flying of the freedom flag. In my adult years I had forgotten how important dance was to me as a vital tool of my creative expression. I brought it back, just for me, so I could find my delight in dance again. And now I can’t stop dancing. I can’t wait to play this album live.”
Laura’s last studio album was 2016’s ‘The Dreaming Room’.
The track-listing for ‘Pink Noise’ is as follows:
1.’Safe Passage’
2. ‘Conditional’
3. ‘Church Girl’
4. ‘Remedy’
5. ‘Magical’
6. ‘Pink Noise’
7. ‘Golden Ashes’
8. ‘What Matters’
9. ‘Got Me’
10. ‘Before The Dawn’