Beatrix announces her haunting, off-kilter sophomore album 'We Swallowed The Sky'

Today, Beatrix announces her sophomore album We Swallowed The Sky will be released on April 24 via Nice Life. The LA-based orchestral indie rock/ folk / chamber-pop project of Arielle Kasnetz sees her accessing the deepest recesses of her memory with her upcoming record. The songs are striking and off-kilter, full of surprising melodic turns or boldly arranged instrumentals, and careening from hushed piano numbers to loud full-band blasts.

We Swallowed The Sky’s connecting lyrical thread is Kasnetz returning to a long-gone relationship, allowing its ghost to haunt her former love. This ghost is embodied by the pedal steel that weaves between the past, present and future across the album. Where Kasnetz often feels misunderstood, this record is the most in her own form she has ever felt — Pre-save.

Today’s album news arrives with the new single and video “Class Reunion.” Kasnetz flexes her storytelling prowess as she paints a picture of the exes running into each other after ten years, sparing not one detail for the listener — Stream.

As if a prophecy, she says, “Ten years later, they see each other at a class reunion. He has never quite moved on and desperately wants to talk. There have been a handful of attempts to reconnect over the years, but they’ve always been shut down. He sips a gin and tonic in the corner, working up the nerve to say hello. The conversation is brief and awkward— he fumbles over his words, bragging about his work. He can feel his chance slipping away and starts to have a panic attack. Everyone is pointing and laughing in slow motion. He wakes up, and she’s gone. It wasn’t real — it was just a nightmare. But one thing is true — no one loves him like she did.”

The official video for “Class Reunion” feels like Twin Peaks meets The Office, set in a sterile community center. With a firm grip around commonplace anxiety, it is mesmerizing how Beatrix stares straight into the camera and holds the viewer captive — Watch.

After some time living in New York, Kasnetz moved to LA, where she knew nobody and was living with a mutual friend. But almost immediately, she fell into an inspiring community of musicians, including Philip Etherington, who would go on to co-produce her upcoming album alongside Ehren Ebbage. They recorded the core of each song as a trio, before taking select songs to a wider band which consisted of guitarists Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers) and Ryan Lerman (John Legend, Ben Folds, Vulfpeck), bassist Sean Hurley (John Mayer, Arlo Guthrie), drummer Rob Humphries (Kacey Musgraves), pianist Zac Rae (Death Cab For Cutie, Fiona Apple), pedal steel player Greg Leisz (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Rufus Wainwright), horns player CJ Camerieri (Paul Simon, Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens), woodwinds player Jesse Chandler (Midlake, Mercury Rev) and string arranger Rob Moose (Sufjan Stevens, Taylor Swift, Jay-Z).

ABOUT BEATRIX:

Arielle Kasnetz, the LA-based singer-songwriter who goes by the moniker Beatrix, had to discover her own voice. For most of her life, she trained in classical music, spending hours practicing vocal scales and learning piano pieces. But the stories she told weren’t hers, the words and the feelings somebody else’s who had lived a long time ago. It wasn’t until the pandemic, stuck in her bedroom with an acoustic guitar that someone had gifted to her a few birthdays ago, that she began to try writing for herself.

Now, on her second album and Nice Life Recording Company debut We Swallowed The Sky (April 24), she explores a formative relationship from her past and the reverberations that it left. With an expansive, yearning sound that combines alternative singer-songwriter influences in the form of indie rock, folk and chamber-pop, it’s the sound of a songwriter as committed to honesty and self-exploration as to constant musical progression. The songs are striking and off-kilter, full of surprising melodic turns or boldly arranged instrumentals, and careening from hushed piano numbers to loud full-band blasts. It seems fair to say that Kasnetz’s whole life led to We Swallowed The Sky; a reckoning with how the past bleeds into the present that’s moving, raw, yet perfectly crafted. It’s unmistakably Beatrix’s story, told in Beatrix’s voice.