The cover of Sarah Mary Chadwick’s forthcoming album, 9 Classic Tracks, is a blotchy, lurid watercolour painted by Chadwick herself. It depicts three clothed men performing sex acts on a woman in high heels, her yellowing skin covered only by a bodice that’s been dragged beneath her drooping breasts and a shock of smeared red lipstick.
Chadwick’s Tumblr is covered in images like this one – tableaus from online porn (with a particular predilection for golden showers), blood-spattered animals wearing sinister expressions and washed-up models with nostrils blistered from cocaine abuse.
Sarah Mary Chadwick’s element, in music and in art, is one of self-abasement. Since moving on from Batrider, the Kiwi downer rock band she fronted for 10 years, her songs have been stripped of their fuzz and left sounding vulnerable and melancholy. Her new single, driven by chilly synths and a riveting, understated hook, seems to come from a place of creeping self-doubt – the kind that causes you to ask, over and over again, despite all reassurances, ‘Am I worth it?’.
9 Classic Tracks will be out on 27 March through Rice is Nice.
March 6, 2015 3:26 pm
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