Grace Cummings has always been in search of the intangible. From her 2019 debut Refuge Cove, to her 2022 breakthrough Storm Queen, and through to her 2024 loose concept album Ramona, she has been trying to grasp at that which is always just out of reach. Her music was almost synesthesia-like, summoning colours, moods, and intangible emotions. Cummings’ voice was the vessel for this all; she would snarl, rasp, growl, and manage to fill what feels like an empty canyon with it. Her music became not so much what she was saying but instead how she said it. Her voice is the standout on all her records, the kind to make you pause and pay attention.
On Cummings’ latest album, Bloodhorse!, it’s still the central hook. Full of siren songs, gloomy piano ballads, and bombastic orchestration, the album has her reuniting with Ramona producer Jonathan Wilson. Ramona was frustratingly tinny and full of synthetic strings and horns that swallowed Cummings’ personality instead of elevating her, but on Bloodhorse! there is a better match. Opening track “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Morphine” begins with flutters and trills of woodwinds, leaning so much into the influence of The Sound of Music inspiration that it’s almost horizontal. The band behind Cummings soon kicks into gear, piano notes pounding, strings soaring, and electric guitar rippling like lightning strikes. An ode to numbness, the track is like the beckoning of a storm, dark clouds forming and Cummings at the centre of it like some gothic witch.
Cummings has always been one to be unapologetically daring, taking big swings where others would play it safe – and Bloodhorse! is unquestionably her most experimental work to date. She’s still reaching for those intangible sensations that hover about between identifiable thoughts, but she also plays with more textures and auras. There’s two minutes of humming drones hiding at the end of “Fake”, a psychedelic warble behind the 60s pop strings of “John Lennon”, and even a brief bit of AI country slop on “Bloodhorse! (Take Two)”.
The latter of those will no doubt be the biggest talking point, for better or worse. Here Cummings presents a gross, sexually explicit fake male cowboy on the track as the enemy; “It’s the extreme version of bowing to a God I don’t believe in,” she explains. It’s bold, sure, and will have many questioning if the streaming service they were listening to randomly shifted to play something else.
There’s a debate too about whether one should let this nondescript sort of computer generated music have any space on a record, especially one where it’s surrounded by an artist with such an unmistakable voice. Across Bloodhorse! she is clutching at what that higher power is. “I use the word ‘God’ in my music because it’s the biggest word there is. I don’t know what it means, but I feel it in a lot of things,” she elaborates. Whether it’s a faceless huge bearded man with five fingers or a faceless AI entity, Cummings isn’t trying to serve up simple answers. Here “Bloodhorse! (Take Two)” is the antithesis of what she wants from her music, and it’s a point to build up hope from. It’s provocative and arguably the very thing that the album might be remembered for.
There is still plenty of Cummings on fine form to enjoy though. “My God” (whose breathlessness is all the starker considering it was recorded when Cummings was suffering from pneumonia) builds speed like a steam engine while “Bloodhorse” gallops to a climax of regal brass, choral voices, and rising strings. Her detached delivery on “I’m Not Crazy” matches perfectly to a tale of forming into a version of an idealized woman; “I can tell you I love you / If that’s what you want to hear,” she sings, empty behind the eyes. “My Island and Me” conjures images of stranded Greek mythological gods like Circe and Calypso, a ragged electric guitar solo creeping in over the piano torch song, like a chainsaw felling a beautiful tree. It’s the kind of song that you would see live in a dimly lit club that would enrapture you completely.
Where Bloodhorse! falters most is its pacing and flow. Cummings builds to grandiose highs and lets the energy dissipate all too easily, especially in the first half. The aforementioned two minute drone break comes just one track after another short interlude while come the end of the album Cummings sounds at odds at how to wrap things up neatly. The underrealised final track “See You in Fifty Years” is lush and large with opulent strings, charging to the end point, but at just over two minutes long, it feels like an in-joke we never quite got the lead into.
“It being over the top makes so much sense to me,” Cummings has said. “You show this grand thing to access the feeling. And deciding to represent not just the way it is, but the way it feels.” The grandeur of Bloodhorse! is fun when it’s let loose – see the “Hey Jude”-like crescendo of “WITCH! WITCH! WITCH!” with its build up of choir, bells, and sax (and on which Cummings reportedly sang vocals for while holding a scythe) – and it’s so very easy to get swept up in. But even though there’s a taming of the overcompensating from Ramona thanks to velvety and sultry torch songs, a better dynamic range, and overall improvement of the quality of sound, Bloodhorse! doesn’t quite match the highs of Cummings’ best outing. “Fill it with sound and fury,” she sings on “My God”, a telling line that feels like an ethos for her music. It’s certainly full here, but what the flavour is remains somewhat indiscernible. It’s what you get when you go to give the feeling instead of showing it.
