Hayley Thompson-King recently announced her forthcoming sophomore album, Sororicide, which was produced by Sean Slade (Radiohead, Hole, Pixies, Juliana Hatfield) and is due out October 2, 2020. The album is available for pre-order at Bandcamp now. Today, Thompson-King has shared a new single, “Whiskey Dick,” with The Boot who says, “The fuzzy guitars. The crashing drums. The anguish in her voice…Don’t call my phone / Don’t speak my name / You’ll die alone / And I’ll hope in vain, Thompson-King sings, pushing every bit of emotion out and into her delivery.” Of the track, she offers, “‘Whiskey Dick’ is about straight-up out-of-control-drunken-hate. For us, that translates into the clanging and banging of the instruments and the belligerent howling and then some coherence and groove happening at the same time. It’s tough to describe, but this song was inspired by something that happened to me. It was someone I loved who crossed the line into that confusing space closer to emotional manipulation than rape (something I don’t have to explain to any other woman). Anyway, this is a musical expression of the rage I was left alone with and was too cool to express at the time.”
Sororicide is a narrative that incorporates Thompson-King’s original songs with her own arrangements of arias she sang early in her operatic studies at NYU and the New England Conservatory of Music. She uses these contrasting styles to tell her own story of an artist whose inner voice is so deafening, she comes to believe it is that of a parasitic twin she absorbed while in utero. This concept of duality is also undeniably part of her voice itself as she staggers from primitive rock shrieks to vibrato drenched operatic runs, sounding at times like two different people.
“Recording Hayley presented technical challenges,” says producer Sean Slade. “Very expensive German microphones proved no match for her powerful singing, and when mixing, her vocal tracks left Mad Oak’s vintage Geiger counter a smoking wreck!”
Sororicide Track Listing:
1) Little Less Lonesome
2) Mid-nite Convenient
3) All The Boys Love You
4) Prologue
5) Must the Winter Come So Soon
6) Liederjahr
7) Malcolm’s Moon
8) Drink Her Away
9) Whiskey Dick
10) Toi, le coeur de la rose…
11) Elijah
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