koleżanka Announces Sophomore Record 'Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes'

koleżanka, the project of multi-instrumentalist Kristina Moore (she/they), is announcing their sophomore album Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes today. Moore, busy with their work in Foyer Red, is returning to koleżanka with a refined sense of purpose. Throwing themself into the proverbial meat grinder to extract songs from their past, present, and future that are brutally honest and stunningly orchestrated.

Their new single, "Slapstick," is written from the perspective of a lifelong service worker, which Moore knows all too well. Moore writes about the banal struggle of working for tips, contorting yourself for patrons who are, at the worst of times, openly hostile and at the best of times a fleeting distraction from subsistence living.

The subtext here, of course, is of the consistent degradation of the working class in work arbitrarily deemed as unskilled labor. To this feeling of being set up for failure and the inability to escape the mundanely vicious cycle, Moore sings "getting tired of my late night tricks / disassociate into a drink or two / it is hard to be kind to yourself in a world that isn't kind to you."

Speaking to the "Slapstick", Moore writes:

"This song is an ode to the service industry and a lament on the lifestyle it cultivates for me. You're required to adopt a breezy, welcoming demeanor that can suck the life out of you when life is tough and the last thing you want to do is talk to a stranger about a steak you can't afford. I've been lucky enough lately to work in some places with pretty chill patrons, but I still get tables that make me feel as though they're just waiting for me to fail, waiting for a way to reprimand someone about something arbitrary. Broadly too, the way the rich are rewarded for being rich while the poor are penalized for their lack of resources while the economy depends on cheap labor from those who lack resources is the cruelest joke."

koleżanka released their debut LP, Place Is, for Bar/None in July of 2021 to accolades from AllMusic, KEXP, Bandcamp, Stereogum, Paste Magazine and more. Their last single "Canals of our City" picked up where Place Is left off, with layers of otherworldly vocals soaring over Stereolab-indebted grooves that sprawl out, shimmering like an inferior mirage.

"Canals of the City" sees koleżanka sorting through tragedy, recalling an intense loss that shaped their relationship with their teenage love and the weight of that experience. Moore goes acutely autobiographical, describing this traumatic experience in detail. While Moore works through the tragedy that occurred that summer, the chorus of celestial vocals rises into one final crescendo, carrying the weight of that love, that memory, and that future that never was.

Alone with the Sound the Mind Makes is out February 17th on Bar/None and was recorded at Pulp Arts in Gainesville, FL. The album was engineered by Danny Clifton and Lily Ruckstuhl and mixed & mastered by Jonathan Schenke at Studio Windows in Brooklyn, NY. Kristina Moore and Ark Calkins produced the album.

Listen to the new single here:

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