Johanna Warren Announces New Album |
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October 15, 2026: Singer/songwriter and producer Johanna Warren has announced her new album Frog in the Belly of a Snake will release on January 29th through Soul Selects. Her first new album in nearly five years, Frog in the Belly of a Snake is deliberate and meditative, rooted firmly in the healing power of the natural world, with performances that tap into a profound sense of liberation while finding comfort and release in the embrace of our transience. Warren unveiled the first look at the album with the lead single “Automatic,” a driving, angsty tune that finds the narrator exhausted by the endless cycle of striving, falling, trying again, and discovering that the only home she can ultimately count on is the one inside herself. The accompanying video features found footage filmed by a teenage Warren with a digital camcorder visualizing excerpts from her dream journal. |
“I’ve been on a bit of a mission these last few years to resuscitate within myself a spontaneous, uncomplicated way of making art for pleasure, like children do,” stated Warren, harkening back to her experimental EP The Night of the Wind based on a book she wrote when she was 3 years old. “My high school friend Leora and I recently reconnected out of the blue, and we got to reminiscing about all the weird art we used to make for fun/to stave off the doldrums of suburban adolescence. I remembered this one film in particular and just had an inkling it could make a good music video for ‘Automatic.’ When I put the song over the footage, the way the two things lined up was spooky.”
Warren had previously hinted at the arrival of the forthcoming album with the recently released “Islamorada,” a portrait of desire stripped of all irony and self-protection, featuring Chris St. Hilaire (The Black Keys) on electric guitar and David Rothon (Marissa Nadler) on pedal steel. Stereogum hailed it as “another poignant tune that finds power in pleading,” while BBC Radio Wales called it “sublime.”
There are hungers that keep us alive, and hungers that consume us. Across the fourteen songs on Frog in the Belly of a Snake, Warren twists and winds through the unruly terrain of human appetites: hunger for food, hunger for love, hunger for freedom, for glory, connection, annihilation. A dark ecological eroticism runs rampant throughout the album. It is both cosmic and profane, sexy and depressing, furious and funny. Warren’s production choices are psychedelically eclectic: lush arrangements, often involving found objects such as glass bottles and pieces of scrap metal, give way to stark a cappella invocations. Rogue field recordings from Warren’s extensive travels (drag queens clacking over a metal bridge in stilettos at midnight, a Welsh farmer complaining about filling in forms, a friend’s newborn baby cooing and gurgling) add layers of autobiographical depth and sonic mystery.
Much of the foundational tracking for Frog in the Belly of a Snake was done live to tape at Big Jelly Studios in Ramsgate, UK, with CJ Jones on drums and Tom Sansbury on bass, while Warren was finishing up her last studio album, 2022’s Lessons for Mutants. But the following year, Warren publicly stepped back from music indefinitely to focus on her health. After a traumatic childhood and decades of living with chronic illness, addiction, disordered eating and the relentless demands of a musical career, Warren reached a breaking point. “My body was staging a protest,” Warren says. “A riot. And rightly so. It had been petitioning me for years to make some serious changes, and I let it get to a point where it stopped asking nicely and started throwing Molotov cocktails in the streets.”
In the reclusive, introspective years that followed, Warren let it all go and focused on “tending to the wound.” And in that space of surrender—with a great deal of help from the natural world (Warren is a passionate herbalist and forager) and her local community (especially a cohort of young regenerative landworkers growing organic vegetables in the rural Welsh village she now calls home)—her body healed remarkably, and her desire to make music returned in an entirely new way: “When I was younger, I was consumed by this burning, gnawing ambition eating away at me from the inside. Now I feel full.”
When she revisited her 2022 recordings three years later, she knew they were not just demos. “There was a freedom and a lightness in our playing, because we were just messing around, with none of the pressure or heaviness of making a record.” Over the next year, Warren continued to chip away at recording additional songs and layers of production in her bedroom in Wales, and completed tracking during a winter artist residency in New Jersey at Soul Selects Studio. The resulting album is not an account of personal recovery so much as it is a prayer for collective regeneration. Taken as a whole, it’s a poignant exploration of the delicate web of life and death that binds us all, a celebration of mystery and impermanence that captures both the terrifying vulnerability and ecstatic relief of learning to let go and start anew.
Track List: 01) Web 02) The Current 03) Circular Logic 04) Automatic 05) Invocation 06) A Power Greater 07) Islamorada 08) Wildcrafted 09) Silver Light 10) Voice of Reason 11) Frog in the Belly of a Snake 12) Bathwater Baby 13) New Friend Blues 14) Feeding Me Feeding You |
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Credit: Kate Kantur |
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