If you asked who we hoped for an album from most in 2020, Half Waif (Nandi Rose) would’ve been pretty high up the list. Today, Half Waif has shared details of her new album ‘The Caretaker’, the follow-up to the sublime ‘Lavender’. On lead single ‘Ordinary Talk’, Rose cages you within a claustrophobic atmosphere of dense synths and itchy percussion clicks. Soon the atmosphere falls away, Rose left alone with her piano to sing, “Walking to the lake / getting in my car / folding up the laundry / taking it too hard / everybody knows it’s how we fall apart”. Even when she’s riffing on life’s mundanities, Rose’s voice never ceases to be otherworldly, conveying emotion like few others can. Ever the sorcerer, Rose then casts a dark gloom over the track as she whispers, “Baby don’t worry about me, I don’t worry about you” until her voice trails off into the distance.
Speaking about the track, Rose said: “Recognizing your own ordinariness can be depressing, or it can be a relief. In Ordinary Talk, I wanted to honor and celebrate my ordinariness as an incredible tool for making me feel less alone. The song is a reassurance that feeling bad – or ‘ill’ – isn’t something that needs to be corrected. There’s a depth of experience that comes from feeling emotions at their extremes. And it is, in fact, this vivid, varied messiness that makes us human and ordinary.”
‘The Caretaker’ is out March 27 on Anti- Records
