GRACE CUMMINGS - ATO Records To Release New Album From Australian Artist

GRACE CUMMINGS Signs To ATO Records, Announces New Album & Shares Captivating New Single “Heaven” Storm Queen out January 14, 2022

Early praise for Grace Cummings: “With Refuge Cove, she’s carved her own path worth following.” - Pitchfork “This is a record that lifts you and quietly carries off the day. It looks for sleep in its restless thought, its double lullabies, shadowy refrains; it confects a soothing air that falls back through the century while bearing a very contemporary ache...Refuge Cove laps quietly at the shores of whatever consumes us...rewarding re-listening with layers of a quietly gorgeous imaginary. It’s clear Grace Cummings bears an intrepid soul, a longing that moves beyond what we see of the ordinary. These are songs for the living, songs for the broken and gone and strange.” - Gold Flake Paint Melbourne-based singer, songwriter, producer and accomplished stage actor Grace Cummings announces today that she has signed with ATO Records, who will release her forthcoming, self-produced sophomore album. Storm Queen will be released on January 14th on ATO Records, and follows Cummings’ understated debut album Refuge Cove, which was released in 2019 via King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s Flightless Records. True to its title, Storm Queen is a body of work with its own unruly climate, governed only by the visceral quality of Cummings’ spellbinding and devastating vocal presence, as heard on stage opening for the likes of Weyes Blood, Evan Dando, J Mascis and more. With most songs captured within the first few takes and featuring unexpected flourishes by Cummings’ peers in Melbourne, Storm Queen showcases a vast and volatile emotional landscape from one of the most captivating folk artists to enter the scene in years.   Pre-order Storm Queen HERE   In celebration of the album announcement, Grace Cummings shares the record’s first single and album opener. On the majestic “Heaven,” which was recorded in one take, Storm Queen instantly reveals the untamed intensity of Cummings’s voice, as well as her penchant for crafting lyrics both poetic and brutally forthright. “The chorus to ‘Heaven’ has the words ‘Ave Maria’ in it, but not because I’m religious in any way,” Cummings explains. “To me talking about God or Mother Mary is a way of labeling something beautiful that I don’t understand, something that’s not quite a part of the world we live in.” Listen to the song and watch the hypnotic music video HERE.

(Credit: Gil Gilmour)

Storm Queen Tracklisting 1. Heaven 2. Always New Days Always 3. Dreams 4. Up in Flames 5. Freak 6. Here is the Rose 7. Raglan 8. Two Little Birds 9. This Day in May 10. Storm Queen 11. Fly a Kite A near-lifelong musician, Cummings got her start as a drummer in a series of high school bands whose repertoire largely consisted of AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix covers. As she began writing songs of her own, she mined inspiration from artists like seminal Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly, Bob Dylan, and Spiritualized frontman J Spaceman, as well as from the traditional Irish folk music her father often played at home. “Irish melodies are some of my favorites; they go to such dark and dramatic places,” she says. Soon after striking out as a solo artist in the late 2010s, Cummings landed a deal with Flightless Records (a Melbourne-based record label founded by former King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard drummer Eric Moore). Having attended drama school, she’s also spent much of the past decade performing in the Australian theater, and recently played the lead role in the Melbourne Theatre Company’s production of Joanna Murray-Smith’s Berlin. Noting her eternal fondness for Shakespeare—“If anyone wants me to play Hamlet, I’ll do it”—Cummings has found her lyrical sensibilities indelibly informed by certain literary influences. “To me poems and stories are sometimes more of an inspiration than music, because they don’t give you a melody: you have to just imagine your own,” she says.  Over the years, Cummings has matched her idiosyncratic musicality with a deliberately spontaneous approach to songwriting. “I don’t really do that thing where I lock myself away and sit down at a table like, ‘Right, let’s write a song now,’” she says. “If I feel like I have something I want to write, I just get it all out in the moment.” And in the studio, Cummings remained wholly committed to following her deepest and most immediate instinct. “I’m not precious at all about recording; it just doesn’t make sense to me,” she says. “I am who I am and I sound how I sound, and I’m not really interested in going in like some kind of magician to try to make it sound any different.”  In the making of Storm Queen, Cummings reinforced the self-possessed naturalism at the heart of her artistry, ultimately distilling her vision down to its most elemental essence. “In the past there were times when I’ve let other people’s opinions affect me too much,” she says. “But with this record I learned that I’m allowed to influence myself instead of taking in anyone else’s ideas. I learned to completely trust what I see and hear in my head, and I stuck with that and just focused on creating what I love the most: something real and raw and ugly and beautiful.”

Connect with Grace Cummings: Instagram | Facebook