Next month, Queens-based songwriter Hannah Pruzinsky aka h. pruz is releasing a new album Red sky at morning, the follow-up to their 2024 debut album No Glory. Today they've shared the new single "Krista," which comes with a video made from a homemade childhood YouTube horror series Pruzinsky made with their cousin Molly Schenkenberger.
On "Krista," things are not as they appear. Throughout the balmy acoustic track, Pruzinsky's vocals switch between silvery runs and a tape-recorded spoken whisper. It's as if two realities are colliding, like a ghost spotted in the middle of the day. A woman screaming on her porch turns out to be a tree. "I stood a little longer and I started to realize/ It was a tree and not a woman/ But I could still feel the scream/ Does that mean that something is still screaming?," Pruzinsky says hushed. "You can feel the longing if you let it in," they sing during the chorus, tapping into a latent frequency. Towards the end, spoken word and pearly vocals collide.
Alongside the new single, Pruzinsky also announced an RPG book entitled A Sailor's Warning, which is a companion piece for the album. It's a 44-page risograph printed and fully-illustrated "choose your own adventure"-esque journey that was written by Pruzinsky and illustrated by Jono Currier.
"I orient the arc of this album as a long journey for a wandering lost traveler, encountering both inner and external turmoil along the way," Pruzinsky said of the book. When I approached my friend Jono to work on a cover design for this collection of music, we unpacked layers of lore, a world of systems that both the narrator in the songs and the listener is interacting amongst"
Watch the spooky homemade video of "Krista" below.
Red sky at morning is out 11/7 on Mtn. Laurel.
