Australian songwriter Indigo Sparke recently revealed that she’ll release her Aaron Dessner-produced second album Hysteria in October, sharing the excellent “Pressure In My Chest”. She now follows it up with a second teaser of the album, “Blue”, saying:
“This is one of the closest songs to my heart I have ever written. It was a freak accident that came out all in one go, the words, it just didn’t stop pouring out. Everything in shades of Blue. I had just gotten back to Australia from New York and the pandemic hit shortly after. I was in some sort of strange altered state of reality, deep in a grief wave and a relationship death. It felt like something was trying to purge itself out of me. Maybe rage. Maybe hope. Maybe love. I can’t fully explain how deeply I feel this song inside of me. It just is. Like my blood pumping through my veins.”
Those feelings of urgency and uncontrollability are vividly alive in “Blue”, a song that doesn’t really have a hook, it just keeps trudging onwards as Sparke shifts from one emotional state to another, each snapshot as vivid as the last. There are traces of the fresh heartbreak in the song, but as her mind continues to pour out there come mixed images of familial memories, her urban environment, lessons of tender emotional growth and the way that loss of all forms weathers and shapes who we are as people. It’s a truly cathartic piece with no real direction; it just feels like Sparke in sensory overload and needing to get it all out. It is utterly gripping thanks to this audible desperation and necessity in her words and voice, guiding us through her labyrinthine thoughts.
The video for “Blue” was directed by Angela Ricciardi, who shares:
“This video is an ode to a city that has shown me continual moments of both wonder and ferocity. Indigo came to me with the initial idea of creating a video that follows her walking throughout the city, and I think that ‘Blue’, in all of its beauty and severity, is a fitting soundtrack to that universal experience. My creative approach was informed by characteristic time quality: seeing everything in a stage of becoming, which requires simultaneous patience and immediacy. I like when something forces me to look. Like falling in love, when time slows and you notice the dance of life that we all belong to. That’s where the magic happens.”
Watch the video below or find “Blue” on streaming platforms.
Indigo Sparke’s new album Hysteria will be out on October 7 through Sacred Bones (pre-order/save). You can find her on Bandcamp, Facebook and Instagram.
