Named an Artist you need to know about - ALTERNATIVE PRESS (July 2024)
“Warm Human’s songs navigate interpersonal conflict with cinematic aplomb… bold, capital-P pop gestures kidnapped from their native environment and thrown against the wall in new and surprising formations” – UPROXX “What is perhaps Johnston’s greatest strength, taking slivers of time and weaving it into words and songs” – BANDCAMP
“Her strong-willed, clear-eyed performances make her music feel as huge and inevitable as a Marvel blockbuster” – CHICAGO READER
Warm Human has officially released her latest album, Hamartia, via Chicago based label mainstay Sooper Records. This marks her first album for Sooper and with a label. Produced and written by Johnston, along with Conor Mackey (Lynyn, NNAMDI, Mobobody), the album follows last year’s alternative rock-leaning Hometown Hero and swings back towards Warm Human’s more electronic roots, while retaining some guitar-infused elements from the former. The new album is also accompanied by a new stunning runway inspired music video for the album’s focus track, “Hamartia.” Check the Paste Magazine premiere HERE.
Warm Human first previewed the record with the release of “Love 2 Hate,” an up-tempo, irresistible Do Revenge cut about the importance of embracing your own negativity from time to time. She further peeled back the curtain on her deeply personal anthology with “My Moods!!,” an adventurous pop-punk break up anthem, which Johnston followed with her melancholic and introspective single, “Mercy Me.” The latter came as an electronic-leaning song of mourning Johnston wrote when she found out she had a massive fibroid that required abdominal surgery that could affect whether or not she could have children in the future.
Johnston explains that much of Hamartia was written after a period of intense introspection and personal assessment, which she calls “Meredith Rehab.” Johnston has been sober for more than eight years and spent this time living with her parents, attending daily 12-step meetings, taking hour-long walks, and figuring out how to tend to her mental health. The album is full of references to Greek tragedies, but they are far from the only influence on the album’s writing and production. Johnston names Portishead, Sheryl Crow, Frou Frou, Madonna's album Music, and Disclosure as key inspirations. She also says that the arena-suitable rhythm of “Dramamine” was a deliberate attempt at the whole Lumineers stomp-clap thing. These influences may sound challenging to weave together cohesively, but Johnston does so, combining the everywoman lyricism of Crow, the cool but not distant electronic soundscapes of Portishead, and the major pop nods of Madonna into an album that centers the negative feelings we have about ourselves, without feeling like therapy session homework. “I'm not a poptimist. I'm a pop pessimist, and I like that. I like being able to bring actual sadness, not like therapy speak sadness, but actual despair and anguish and self-hatred and all the things that I struggle with all the time into a pop record,” she says. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment