Niecy Blues – Exit Simulation

South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves... whole days roll by, forgetting about the body." Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations-often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure-"the permission to imagine leaving." Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, "talking myself off a ledge." The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: "My first experience with ambient music was church-slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don't believe, you feel something.""

1. 1. 1111
2. 2. the Nite B4
3. 3. U Care
4. 4. Violently Rooted
5. 5. Exit Simulation
6. 6. Exits
7. 7. Soma
8. 8. Messages from Above
9. 9. Lament
10. 10. Violently Rooted Reprise
11. 11. the Architect
12. 12. Analysis Paralysis
13. 13. Cascade

Label: Kranky

Catalog: 240

Genre: Rock