Hilary Woods – “Orange Tree”

Joshua Wright

Hilary Woods – “Orange Tree”

Joshua Wright

Next month, the Irish musician Hilary Woods will release Birthmarks, her follow-up to her 2018 debut album Colt. Woods recorded the new LP in while pregnant, traveling in between her Galway home base and Oslo, home of her producer, the Norwegian noise artist Lasse Marhaug. It looks like this album is going to be heavy. First single “Tongues Of Wild Boar” was a gorgeously gothed-out death march. Today, Woods has shared a second song from the album, one that differs pretty starkly from that first one.

The new single “Orange Tree” is a sort of spectral folk lullaby. Woods sings in a sort of soft incantation, and the song works as a gothic reverie. First lyric: “I’m afraid of what’s growing inside of me.” A line would hit hard from anyone. Sung by an eerily calm and very pregnant woman, it touches something dark and primal.

In a press release, Woods describes “Orange Tree” as “a personal song acknowledging an inner fear of the unknown. It’s an exercise in overcoming, becoming more planted and rooted in the earth and in the body.” Woods has also put together a video, a sort of flickering experimental film full of trees and larvae. Check it out below.

Birthmarks is out 3/13 on Sacred Bones.

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