Dorthia Cottrell Releases New Album
Death Folk Country Today via Relapse Records
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“scraping and simmering” STEREOGUM
“somewhere between the darkly subdued chamber-pop of Marissa Nadler and Lingua Ignota’s more intense backwoods spirituals” FLOOD
“haunting... heavy AF emotionally” REVOLVER
press photo by Richard Howard
Across both her solo work and as the vocalist of Windhand, renowned vocalist and songwriter Dorthia Cottrell envisions her music as both a document of love and a reconciliation with death. On her new album, Death Folk Country, Cottrell wards off death through creation - the most distilled form of love. The spirit of love passed on through her words will be the ultimate reward for earthly suffering. Cottrell's enigmatic presence guides listeners down a path of introspection - Death Folk Country's massive scope touches upon tales of love, loss, and so much more.
Cottrell was raised in rural King George, Virginia, a town with less than 5,000 inhabitants. Forests and tall-grass fields stretched before her. Beauty and boredom soared. That vague melancholy and memory of the American South is smudged all over Cottrell’s music. Cottrell grew up a goth, an outcast in a small town – a time and place she revisits throughout Death Folk Country.
"This album to me is about painting a picture of a place where my heart lives,” Cottrell explains. “The title Death Folk Country is partly me describing a genre that fits the sound – but it's also meant to be taken as a Naming, a coronation of the world inside me. ‘Death Folk Country’ is the music and also the land where the music takes place, and the two have always been inextricable from each other."
Cottrell’s voice, a soaring alto, fills the emptiest of canyons. Singing in echoing harmony with itself, her voice is a kind of prophecy, bringing home to the present thoughts and realizations from the future, even as Cottrell buries herself in remembrance of the past. Death Folk Country takes these nostalgic ideas of "home" and confronts them with their own imperfections and darkness.
The album is out today via Relapse, her first for the label and follow up to her highly acclaimed, 2015 S/T solo debut. All songs on Death Folk Country were written / played by Dorthia Cottrell and recorded / produced by Jon K. and Cottrell at SANS Studios in Richmond, Virginia.
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