Clarissa Connelly announces new album "World Of Work"

Scottish-born, Copenhagen-based producer, composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Clarissa Connelly has announced her debut album on Warp Records, World of Work, to be released on 12th April 2024. With this announcement, she shares a new single from the album “An Embroidery”, with a playful music video. Watch here.

“An Embroidery” is an image of growth, building one sonic element at a time to reach a great cacophony. Within this cacophony, Connelly brings together incongruous sounds of clanging church bells with heavy distorted bass guitars, a patchwork quilt of her evolving sound. The single is perfectly exemplary of Connelly’s penchant for bringing together the ancient with the modern.

Clarissa Connelly says on the new release: "An Embroidery was one of the first songs I wrote for World of Work. It truly is about gathering all the threads and making an embroidery; making an album."

This sentiment returns in the mysterious music video, in which Clarissa hurries through a dark stone tower, where reality shapeshifts into a Looney Tune-esque world. The piano keys morphing into a sleazy, toothy cartoon grin, its tongue snapping at the lid. If “Wee Rosebud”, the delicate lament and first release on Warp, displayed the wild extent of Clarissa’s impressive vocal aptitude in solitude, “An Embroidery” exhibits the full force of her and her band.

World of Work comes together as a dream-like synthesis of Nordic folk song, Celtic myth, medieval grimoires, modern pop music, as well as experimental composition and studio practices. It explores the sacred and the profane with the guidance of 20th-century French philosopher Georges Bataille.

The title itself is plucked from, L'érotisme, "Man has come to know the exterior world [of work], but he remains ignorant of his own nature. [Yet] if he had not first awoken to awareness through work, he would know nothing at all." Connelly notes the two main ‘characters’ of the album are Work and Desire, where Work reflects the profane, the quotidien, mundanity, and Desire exists as exaltation, the body pushed to physical limits, art, ecstasy. The two exist simultaneously, giving us the human experience. Clarissa equates the idea of a “world of work” with succumbing to the brute force of the world in the face of trauma, rather than seeking empowerment. Her own World of Work actively revitalizes us from within.

The influences for this album span centuries: French philosophers, 12th-century letters, visions from Catholic Saints, and William Blake’s poetry. Each reference hinging on the inclusion of ecstasy in our daily lives. In visionary author Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias, letters written in 1151, she speaks to the regenerative power of music, describing music as a tool to recapture the beauty of our heavenly origin, which we lose sight of when falling prey to worldly woe. The Catholic Saint Teresa of Avilla had a mystical vision in which the human soul was portrayed to her as a crystal castle. Echoing Bataille, who claimed that we are distracted by the world of work and “ignorant of our own nature;” St. Teresa’s philosophy was that “each of us has a soul, but we forget to value it.” At the centre of Teresa’s Interior Castle is absolute divine love, but to access it one must reflect upon all fears and desires. Similarly William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience follows the metamorphosis from childhood paradise to the hells of adulthood. Experience being the loss of Innocence at the hands of fear and desire. World of Work calls us to confront the spectres of fear and death that surround us. At the same time, it guides our attention to a flowering vitality both within ourselves and the world at large.

Born in Scotland, Clarissa Connelly relocated as a child to Denmark, where the cultural landscape has fuelled her creativity, through exploring the sacred sites, mythology, and music of Nordic culture. She first gained international attention with Tech Duinn (2018), a hypnotic album named after a spiritual gateway in Celtic myth. For her most recent album, The Voyager (2021), Clarissa physically walked the Scandinavian landscape, channelling melodies from ancient pre-Christian sites. To allow others to join virtually, Connelly developed an app called Vandringen that responds sonically to these sites. The album received global acclaim and was awarded the prestigious Nordic Music Prize which is a testament to her studious dedication to composition as a master's student at the prestigious Rhythmic Music Conservatory (CPH).

Other impressive accolades include opening for Jenny Hval across the UK & EU last year as well as taking part in Laurie Anderson’s choir. It’s also worth noting her recent premiere of Canons at Roskilde Festival, a choir piece that included Erika de Casier, Astrid Sonne, Henriette Motzfeldt (Smerz) and others. Stay tuned for more music from Clarissa Connelly.

Headline Shows

May 10th - ALICE, Copenhagen, DK

May 15th - King's Place, London, UK

Festival Dates

Apr 6 - Variations Festival, Nantes, France

Apr 7 - BRDCST Festival, Brussels, Belgium

Apr 18 - 20 - Motel Mozaique, Netherlands

Aug 29 - Sept 1 End of The Road Festival, Dorset, UK