Los Angeles-based writer and musician Claire Cronin has announced a new album. It’s called Bloodless, and it arrives November 12 via Ordinal Records. Check out the newly unveiled title track below, and scroll down for the LP’s cover artwork and tracklist.
“As for what the song is about, it defines “bloodless” as nonhuman — a spirit without mortal pain or needs,” Cronin explained in a press release. “In the lyrics, I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to not live in a human body. A lot of the record is about this: wanting to transcend myself and my body and the facts of existence. But in this song, I’m making the statement that we can’t do that. We can’t get out. We’re not bloodless. And we can’t really know what’s going on in the spiritual world, despite what some religious believers say. God’s will — if such a thing exists — is a mystery. We have to keep living despite this. I’m reckoning with these truths.”
Bloodless marks Claire Cronin’s third full-length album, following 2019’s Big Dread Moon and her 2020 memoir Blue Light of the Screen. The LP was recorded by Cronin alongside her collaborator and husband Ezra Buchla, with mixing by Deerhoof’s John Dieterich. Cronin said of recording the album in near-total isolation during one of the worst wildfire seasons in California history:
Some days, the air was so toxic that we couldn’t leave the house. Days passed indoors with our air filters going, while the sky outside was orange and dark from morning until dusk. The recording process was almost hallucinatory — I would lose my sense of time in the music’s repetition and the heat of the tiny room where I was playing. The photo on the record cover is from this time.
I felt trapped and hopeless and terrified — of the virus, of the fires, of what was going on in American politics. In some ways, death felt far away — numbers of fatalities on the news — but it was also a constant threat. When I found out I was pregnant at the end of July, I had an even more heightened awareness of life and death. Most of my parts on the record had been finished by then, though, so the record isn’t about the pregnancy.
Bloodless Cover Artwork:
Bloodless Tracklist:
1. Bloodless
2. Through The Walls
3. Feel This
4. Snakes For Angels
5. No Forcefield
6. I Could Not Let Blood
7. To Ferry Across
8. Not A Noise
9. Now I Don’t Leave
