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MUSIC FEATURE

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Gargantuan songs – like the juicy, Prince-y grime of LA Type in which Kimbra growls like Bette Davis, or GLT ,which includes a brilliant softboi voice memo, sit with the gorgeously meditative Foolish Thinking and first single Save Me . Says Kimbra: “There’s the real rhythm-physicality of a lot of these songs on the record, and then there’s this really

A Reckoning by

Kimbra is out now via Inertia/PIAS.

Recognise your own voltage... stop trying to annihilate it, and just listen to it

contemplative, internal kind of hovering; those songs are not grounded by a heartbeat.” Save Me , as one of the hoverers, is a bold curtain opener. Its melody takes

slow milli-steps upward, then lilts down again – careful and also hopeful. There's no solid beat, though one small sweep of snare emerges partway through. “I was

even unsure about that snare at all,” Kimbra smiles. “I didn’t want it to get heavy-handed. I wanted it to stay floating... the song had to feel unsettling, and then there also had to be a feeling of release in that chorus, like true surrender.” Siphoning those ideas into sound came via a distinct visual. "You’re driving in the back of a car, a taxi, from your lover’s

INTERVIEW

BECKONING THE RECKONING : KIMBRA Cupcake cute with self-love to spare – that's how we knew Kimbra in her Cameo Lover days. But over the course of three albums and 22 formative years, there's been an evolution in that blithe somebody that you used to know. Kimbra's fascination with big themes and their micro, intimate effects have culminated in her extraordinary fourth record, A Reckoning . Words Zoë Radas

house," Kimbra explains, closing her eyes to focus on her mind's eye. "And the sound of the highway is going by in the car; and that pre-chorus comes and you admit to yourself: ‘I lack the courage to take care of myself’. Then, you wind up the window, and all the noise goes away and it’s just you in the car, with yourself. And all the reverb goes off the voice. " Once we identified that, we kind of found the ‘world’ for the song: the rush of all the noise and then the solitude of being alone with yourself." Rhythm and accent have been cornerstones of Kimbra's work since spectacularly percussive

“I see a real confidence in this record, of a woman listening to herself,” Kimbra tells us. She's talking about her new album's penultimate track, Personal Space , in which she sings that her need for the titular distance is “just a thing that my body tells me,” assuring her interlocutor “I'm trying to tell you all that I'm feeling.” And that feeling is definitely visceral. “Gut instinct," she nods. "So much of this record is actually about me grounding in that physicality. Anger, as a force, you feel it in your body. And yet there’s also another kind of stillness that sits in the body, that you have to really listen for.

debut single Settle Down (2010), but for this album she deliberately aimed for a different beacon. “[For] many of these tracks I completely abandoned any thought about rhythm," she reveals. "It got back to that classic singer songwriter feel that I started with. I started as a girl-on-guitar, and I think I wanted to return to some of those origins. My love of rhythm sometimes distracts me away from the core feeling of what I'm really trying to say..."

“My journey over the last few years has really been about getting back into that space of listening... It’s a voltage. Voltage can go into really destructive places if you’re just letting it run wild. But if you harness it, it can be grounded into a really great strength. It’s also the life-force of change in the world: protest, and really powerful sh-t, happens when you recognise your own voltage. Stop trying to annihilate it, and just listen to it. What’s the frustration saying?” The fluency of Kimbra's ideas results in a whirlpool of a record, which orbits the eye of its title; the parts closer to the eye move carefully, and the parts on the outer rim reach a boil.

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FEBRUARY 2023

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