Brand new single from Jessi Robertson

Jessi Robertson is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter with a voice that can hush a crowd one moment and rattle walls the next. Over the last two decades, she’s become known as an artist who spins pensive reflection into power and imagination into something truly meaningful while delivering a fiercely original musical output. Originally hailing from a small town in upstate New York, Jessi set out on her artistic path after moving to Brooklyn back in 2003, where she engrained herself in the city’s indie music scene.

There, she released two acclaimed studio albums, 2011’s Small Town Girls and I Came From the War in 2014, establishing herself as a voice of lyrical candour and emotional context. Her songwriting, informed by everyday experience and laced with surreal flourishes, drew deserved comparisons to Kate Bush, Stevie Nicks and PJ Harvey while firmly planting Jessi on the map of must watch artists. After relocating to Nashville in 2018, she unearthed a recording from her 2014 album release show, giving fans an intimate window into her earlier era.

But in recent years, she’s entered a new phase defined by both artistic reinvention and personal revelation, crystallised in her recent album, Dark Matter, which marked a profound turning point, a record born in the aftermath of her Autism Spectrum Disorder diagnosis and shaped by a newfound understanding of self. Dark Matter is, in every sense, a universe unto itself; penned mostly in 2017, the album uses cosmic imagery of black holes, quantum entanglement, data loss and sleep paralysis to explore the emotional physics of being misunderstood.

Now, Jessi is expanding the Dark Matter sphere with her latest project, the Dark Matter Singularity Series, a collection of reimagined tracks created in collaboration with other artists. The series’ first instalment titled “Shadow War Singularity” marks an adventurous step into new sonic areas while continuing the thematic thread of self-exploration and empathy that ripple throughout her work.

A collaboration with Aaron Berg, “Shadow War Singularity” walks through the psychological trenches of fear and division, looking at how we turn against each other, and against ourselves. Drawing on golem lore and the myth of Frankenstein, the song uses its mythic references to explore the human cost of “othering,” the process of dehumanising what we don’t understand. Framed in a transportive soundscape of alternative folk and avant pop vibes, the arrangement drifts into focus with the delicate flicker of piano and quiet patter of percussion as Jessi’s emotive vocals hover above.

Casting an enchanting scene that flows through elegant melodic flourishes and alluring instrumental elements, carried by the gentle pulse of drums, “Shadow War Singularity” sees Jessi Robertson serve up a dazzling slice of poetic folk pop music that’s musically charming and thematically profound. Dark Matter and its expanding constellation of songs invite listeners to unmask, to feel and to find beauty in the pieces of ourselves we’ve been told to hide and perhaps that’s what makes Jessi Robertson’s work so groundbreaking: it asks us to step closer to our own edges to find, in the dark, a little more light.

Listen to Shadow War Singularity below

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