Oropendola – Swimming

New York City artist Oropendola (who has played with Half Waif, Barrie, Samir Langus) has announced that her new album Swimming will release on June 27.

Along with the album is a new music video for the song “Pyre.”

This follows singles “Palace of Sunflowers” and “Swimming.” The album will be released by Spirit House Records.

About “Pyre” (music video):

Pyre is about human connection and what it ignites deep within us. The music video by Jackie West, filmed on an old Sony Handycam, explores love and desire as wide-eyed rebirths and accelerated reckonings with our vibrant, fragile mortality. Reading Caitlin Doughty’s “From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death,” I was struck by the image of the funeral pyre. What it would take to gaze unafraid as the ones you love burn and transform.

About Swimming (album):

There is a striking intimacy throughout Swimming, the sophomore album from Oropendola (Brooklyn-based Joanna Schubert). With unwavering reflection and resolve, it rejects what keeps us contained and disconnected, clawing toward something wilder. What would it be like for each of us to inhabit our fullest experience of connection and vulnerability?

In contrast with Waiting for the Sky to Speak, Oropendola’s kaleidoscopic chamber-pop debut, Swimming is foundationally a piano-vocal record. Co-produced with Zubin Hensler (Half Waif, Westerlies, Twig Twig), the album captures Schubert’s penchant and reverence for unfettered live performance. It was recorded as multiple solo sets in her childhood basement, on the same Steinway upright she grew up playing. Schubert’s arrangements feature close collaborators/bandmates Elizabeth LoPiccolo and Gabby Sherba, whose vocalizations recall the bold, idiosyncratic energy of The Roches. Instrumentation oscillates between jagged and lush, with LoPiccolo on flute, Hensler on synths and electric bass, and Schubert sprinkling in touches of toy piano, harpsicle, and cello.

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