VALLEY QUEEN ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM ‘CHORD OF SYMPATHY’ OUT APRIL 21, 2023
“Cassavetes”
Valley Queen
Chord Of Sympathy
Release Date: 4/21/23
VALLEY QUEEN ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM ‘CHORD OF SYMPATHY’ OUT APRIL 21, 2023
Hear/Watch The New Single “Cassavetes” Now
Press Release
Valley Queen today announced their sophomore album, Chord of Sympathy, will be released on April 21st, 2023, sharing the energizing lead single “Cassavetes” as an auspicious preview. The song—which is based on a quote from actor, director, and screenwriter John Cassavetes—arrives with a Cooper Kenward-directed video that finds the Los Angeles band burning their debut LP in the middle of the desert. "There's a thread throughout Cassavetes' films centered around selfhood: its nebulous nature, our ability to project it onto other people, how we try on different selves to be accepted or loved," explains vocalist/songwriter Natalie Carol. "When weaving this idea together with the story of Valley Queen, I realized a lot of this record is about taking off older outfits of selfhood as the outside world perceives it, in this case as a songwriter, recording artist, and band. Cooper suggested we light it all on fire. I thought that was perfect. That's how it felt when we were arranging and recording this record, like we had burned something down and started over."
Valley Queen have also confirmed U.S. West Coast shows presented by Folk Yeah!, including Los Angeles’ Gold Diggers on May 4th. See below for a full itinerary of confirmed dates. Pre-order Chord of Sympathy here.
Chord of Sympathy marks a definitive departure from the system Valley Queen was using as a band to write, arrange, and produce music before this point. In the wake of an original band member’s departure and a global pandemic, the group was pushed to reroute their roles—instead of sticking to their individual instruments, the trio of Carol, Mike Deluccia, and Neil Wogensen moved around, trying on different hats, sharing them, and reinvigorating the Valley Queen sound in a style newly and truly collaborative.
“I see a lot of the writing I do as sourced from a wound, or sourced from love and abundance. Both are valuable,” says Carol. “Our full-length debut Supergiant was written from a lot of wounding, but Chord of Sympathy plays more like a love letter out to the world. Writing this one, I had more access to my inner love, which I wanted to share as a source of comfort for people who listen to our music. Supergiant’s yin has been answered by Chord of Sympathy’s yang.”
Chord of Sympathy reveals itself with the layered allure of a Russian doll: the album as a whole is one love letter, but each song inside is its own note. It opens with the mystical glow of the May 2022 single “Falling,” which sets a supernatural tone for the rest of the album. “Someone shared a quote from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche with me soon after we recorded this one,” Carol shares. “It goes, ‘The bad news was, I was falling. The good news was, there was no ground.’ I think this song is about that. What you think is the ground is the trap door. It was the first song Mike, Neil and I arranged as a three-piece in the studio. It kicked off a whole new era of sound-making for us.”
A dynamically layered sonic universe of intense range, Wogensen’s deft studio touch shapes the overall texture of the LP—elevating Carol’s intimate musings to a cosmic scale. Here, her inimitable vocals are as fearlessly fluid as ever—ethereal to thunderous in a note—and fully consuming. “You can hear the experimentation in these tracks, the diligence and play,” says Carol. “It’s the sound of our band breaking free.” Whereas 2018’s Supergiant channeled pains of the past, Chord of Sympathy is borne of the endless present Carol experienced in her bedroom during lockdown, where time collapsed and the future needed to be created.
Valley Queen’s vibrant new heartbeat resounds across Chord of Sympathy, a forward-looking, starry-souled collection of songs that wrap listeners in a warm and hopeful embrace. “I didn’t coin the phrase ‘chord of sympathy.’ It comes from Hazrat Inayat Khan, an ancient sufi mystic,” Carol shares. “Writing this album, I wanted to embody such a notion: the chord of sympathy, a sound connecting us all.”
Chord of Sympathy Tracklist:
1. Falling
2. Nobody Ever
3. Pavement
4. Cassavetes
5. Chord Of Sympathy
6. Knife In The Trunk
7. Fairy Wing
8. Curse Of The Unknown
9. Range Rover
10. Slow Motion
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