My favorite record of the year would be Allegra Krieger’s Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine. That’s the record I’ll associate with 2024 forever, probably. She opened for us early in the year, so I had heard those songs sort of every night for five weeks in a row, and they’re just such beautiful songs. I think all of her songs really reward listening multiple times, because she’s such a complex songwriter. They were so, so beautiful the first few times I heard them, but it really is almost frightening to me how much I still like them after hearing them every night. She has this really subtle, simple beauty in her lyrics that really sneaks up on you. And I think the arrangements on this record are really interesting and really support the songs.
She’s so good live. I’ve never been more impressed by someone just playing a guitar and singing. I think she’s a once-in-a-generation at that. She played a show at Baby’s recently that was so good — she did a cover of a Misfits song by herself, and I can’t remember which one it was, but it’s about killing a baby [Ed note: It was “Last Caress”]. It’s, like, the scariest sounding song I’ve ever heard, but it was so beautiful when she sang it. She sort of made this communal space for everyone to think about how fucking dark the world is, and how real that darkness is. Maybe that is why she is such a capital-G capital-S Great Songwriter to me, because she is so good at incorporating darkness, and letting things feel heavy. She writes about beauty, but also seems to be really good at contextualizing that in darkness in a way that feels like reality, and feels useful and artistically robust in a way that is just crazy to me.
As told to Annie Fell. Katy Kirby’s Blue Raspberry is out now on ANTI-.
