New York’s Sarah Kinsley is fascinated by creating imaginary worlds and alternate
realities. She tries to conjure these with her music, but it requires the unlocking of
one’s imagination to really go there. Sarah encourages you to try it though. We all
need an escape.
To that end, Sarah’s first album is called “Escaper”, and to which world you choose
to escape is ultimately your own decision. This is vibrant, bold, beautiful music that
confronts death and loss, the decimation of old friendships, romantic love’s
shortcomings compared to the love shared with close friends, and fraught
relationships that flourished and then fizzled. It sounds hugely confident, a real body
of work. “A huge way of how I get through life and pain and horrible experiences is
through the creation of these spaces where you can become someone else as a
distraction—as a means to solving grief,” Sarah says. She works through it all as if
the centerpiece of an epic poem, with high drama melodies and huge sweeping
choruses.
Born in California, and raised in Connecticut and Singapore before returning to New
York for Columbia University, this perfectly unusual leftfield pop singer, songwriter,
and multi-instrumentalist (Sarah plays the piano, synth, guitar, ondes Martenot, glass
bowls, and some violin on the record too) studied music and was creating much
positive noise and conversation online long before she had signed a record deal.
Everything she was putting out was home-spun; self-produced, self-written and
self-performed. Sarah made a habit of documenting her process, and it was one
such video, uploaded in response to the misconception that “Women don’t produce
music” that documented Sarah recording the sounds of tapping on a desk, opening a
door, switching on a light, thumping on a mattress and flicking a wine glass, splicing
them all together and forming the introduction to a prior EP track, Over + Under, that
captured the imagination of a young audience who have been feverishly following
her every move since.
The long hours Sarah spent on YouTube tutorials teaching herself production since
high school quickly paid dividends, but the songs were hitting nerves across the
globe. There’s the phantasmagorical drama of Kate Bush, the understated
reverence of Cocteau Twins, and the nature-first beauty of Maggie Rogers’s “Now