With debut album 'True' out March 13th via Amorphous Sounds, today Tenderness - the solo project of Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) - shares new single "The Salt Flats" - a bittersweet indie-pop song with open-hearted vocals, gently propulsive rhythms and Americana-infused production. Tenderness will be touring across the UK later this month with Jeffrey Martin and playing a headline London show on March 18th at St Pancras Old Church.
On the new single Tenderness said "‘The Salt Flats’ is a song about trying to hold onto good moments, and how impossible that is. Joy, peace, adoration, they’re all very slippery emotions. The song lives in the moment of gentle panic – the good feeling, already leaving. We tried to build that into the music through the synths and the rhythms – a pulling forwards and backwards at once. A kind of nostalgia. I finished writing the song in my friend Martha Rose’s apartment in Berlin, so it was really perfect that she and my friend Benjamin Gregory could do the backing vocals – their voices are the melancholy cherry on top."
"The Slat Flats" on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2XJhWloGoKU
"The Salt Flats" on other streaming services: https://tenderness-songs.ffm.to/thesaltflats
A walk across the salt flats. A pixelated moon on a touchscreen. A song set on the hottest day of the year. A song set on the final day on earth. A song you can’t send to someone, because they’re no longer there. True, the debut album from Tenderness — the solo project of Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) — leads you by the hand through scenes like these, on deceptively simple songs that shimmer with electric guitars and drones and licks of pedal steel. Songs that look sideways at romance and grief and technology. Songs that break hearts with their precise and thoughtful beauty as well as their sadness. Songs that are, by turns, tender like a touch, tender like a bruise.
Tenderness was born out of a tough storm of circumstances: the pandemic, a cancelled tour, a break-up, and the loss of her father. Furloughed and with too much time on her hands, Young began to write new songs in her north London living room, windows wide open to the hot summer outside. “I was having a hard old time but it was also strangely beautiful,” she says. “There’s something about that space of grief that is very tender. There was a lot of sadness, but also a sweetness and openness to the world. You feel things deeply but you’re also gentle with people.”
In August 2020, during that “weird window” of the pandemic where lockdown eased up enough for a trip to the seaside, or across London, Young visited producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon) at his Greenwich studio. In two days, the pair recorded eight demos with no pressure or plan. “It was like a day trip to the land of music,” she recalls. Over the next few years, around lockdowns and tours and day jobs, those demos quietly transformed into True.
Across the ten songs, Young tries to untangle the supposed boundaries between fantasy and fact, romance and the real world. “We perform love in the same way that we perform love songs. And when you sing, performing makes the emotions real again,” she says. “That’s why ‘True’ became the album title. It’s all true, I think.”
Technology is a recurring lens – screens as connector and amplifier as well as barrier. Photos of the moon, video calls, streaming algorithms, and re-read text messages all mirror modern love and grief. Initially, Young considered naming the album Touchscreen for how it evokes both an intimacy and a distancing. “I love making a playlist for someone. I think it’s no less beautiful than a mixtape,” she says. “But if you’re training something to know your romantic buttons, it all gets a bit Her.”
Lyrically, the video calls and databases sit alongside tidal pools, televisions and sugar levels, keeping the songs squarely in Young’s world, even as every track flickers with the influence of country music. While the influence of classic country artists like Patsy Cline and Kris Kristofferson is felt, so is that of Big Thief, Yo La Tengo, Wye Oak and Bill Callahan. “It turns out all of my favourite bands are at least a little bit country,” Young laughs.
Producer Hinshelwood helped shape each song’s sonic world. The final recordings are sparse in that country way but layered with Hinshelwood’s textures: synths, drones, rich backing vocals, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy–style guitar solos. A key ingredient came midway through recording: pedal steel by Scottish musician Harry Bohay (Aldous Harding, Sylvie), whom Young saw performing with Erin Rae. “He was just going to play on two songs in the beginning, but it lifted the music so perfectly that we ended up having pedal steel on almost every song,” she says.
True is a solo album in name, but a communal one in spirit. Longtime collaborators appear throughout: Peggy Sue’s Clay Slade and Olly Joyce, La Luz’s Marian Li-Pino, and members of Deep Throat Choir. Backing vocals come from Berlin musicians Martha Rose, Dandy Deniz and Benjamin Gregory, and the album's finishing touches - strings and synths -- were added by producer Chloe Kraemer. Young comments “One of the most joyful things about doing a solo record has been needing and wanting and being able to invite so many different people to play on it. It feels very beautiful to me that so many of the people I’ve made music with are on the album.”
The result is an album that feels both deeply personal and quietly expansive - a collection of songs born from solitude but shaped by community, rooted in heartache yet reaching toward something hopeful. True doesn’t shout to be heard; instead, it lingers and glows.
See Tenderness live:
20 Jan - Brighton, Hope & Ruin w/ Jeffrey Martin
21 Jan - London, Bush Hall w/ Jeffrey Martin
22 Jan - Manchester, YES w/ Jeffrey Martin
23 Jan - Birmingham, The Sunflower Lounge w/ Jeffrey Martin
24 Jan - York, Bluebird Bakery w/ Jeffrey Martin [SOLD OUT]
18 March - London, St Pancras Old Church
True artwork:
True tracklist:
1. Saturday Morning
2. The Salt Flats
3. True
4. Touchscreen
5. We'll Always Have Paris 1919 (YouTube)
6. Peacetime
7. Database Blues (YouTube)
8. Day of Atonement
9. Heat Wave Love Song
10. Playing 'Country Roads'
Links:
Instagram
Website
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