Zach Top Alex [VINYL]

Daughter of Swords is the solo project of North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig (they/she), who has also released music with bands Mountain Man and The A’s. Their solo debut, Dawnbreaker, was a hushed folk record released in 2019; in the years since, Sauser-Monnig found a new understanding of self, personally and musically. Across the last several years, Daughter of Swords’ music has grown thornier, an unpredictable and knotty tangle of technicolor synths, heady guitar, bubbling rhythms, a sheen enveloping songs about raw human intensity writ large – crushes, desire, anger, alienation, the horrors of late-stage capitalism, the cascading paradigm shifts it seems we’re all hurtling toward. Enter Alex, Daughter of Sword’s sinewy new record. Recorded at Betty’s (Sylvan Esso’s studio), Alex was built out by Sauser-Monnig’s longtime friends/collaborators Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man, The A’s), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso, Made of Oak), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia). There’s a sharp cerebral tension between the stories at the core of these songs and the electrifying, playful buoyancy of the sound, the wink with which Sauser-Monnig can deliver a withering observation. Reckoning with pleasure-seeking, boundary-breaking, and their place in the world, Alex heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet. A reassessment of inner systems, and relationships of all sorts — with art and creativity, with other humans, with gender – happened in tandem with Sauser-Monnig’s interrogation of the late-capitalist culture that makes life for working artists an inequitable grind. Forced out of their habitual ways of thinking and being, Sauser-Monnig found new energy in dissolving old limitations—be they about the music business or their concept of gender—and exploring in uncharted territory. Their priority became maximizing the mood of each track, borne out in Alex’s layers of synthetic textures and unorthodox flourishes. “Alone Together,” a single released this past fall, follows a confident new sense of self and emotional protection as it bends under the physical need for sex, connection, and closeness. That specifically fresh, raw form of desire – and the peculiar sense of aplomb that comes from newfound freedom– appears throughout the record, stringing together a gritty, kaleidoscopic and unpredictable tilt-a-whirl of high-octane guitar rock colliding with some folk song sensibilities. “I feel strange/But it’s just a natural reaction/To a world coming apart at the seams,” they sing in “Strange.” These personal excavations led Sauser-Monnig to a clear personal mission, which they explain succinctly: “I refuse to let the state of the world deny me the ability to live in joy, while also trying to show up for others.”