Laura Mvula Previews New Album ‘Pink Noise’ With ‘Church Girl’
Laura Mvula has released a new song, “Church Girl,” from her upcoming album, Pink Noise, which is set to arrive July 2nd via Atlantic Records.
“Church Girl” boasts a big, glossy beat that feels taken straight from the Eighties, and it finds Mvula confronting the doubts that came after the acclaim that accompanied her first two albums didn’t necessarily materialize into serious success. “How can you dance with the devil on your back?” Mvula belts during the punchy chorus, “How can you move?/Caught up in a picture-perfect/That will never last.”
In a statement, Mvula said of the song: “For so long I identified as the things that happen in my life, the things I do, good or bad. I’m letting go of this mind-made ‘me.’ I’m coming home to myself beyond the realm of form. I am not the thoughts in my head, or the things I achieve, or the shape of my haircut. I no longer ‘dance with the devil’ on my back. I’m basking in the light of knowing my true self, the deeper ‘I’.”
Pink Noise marks Mvula’s third album and follows her 2016 effort, The Dreaming Room. “Church Girl” is the second song she’s released from the record, following “Safe Passage,” which arrived earlier this month.
Pink Noise also arrives on the heels of a four-track EP, 1/f, which Mvula released in February (on the frequency spectrum, “1/f noise” is also known as “pink noise”). The project found Mvula reimagining three songs from her previous albums and covering Diana Ross’ “I’m Still Waiting.”
“This is the album I always wanted make,” Mvula said of Pink Noise. “Every corner is made warm with sunset tones of the Eighties. I was born in 1986. I came out of the womb wearing shoulder pads. I absorbed the dynamism of the Eighties aesthetic right from my first moments on this planet. Wrestling with identity seems to be one of the rites of passage of the established artist. Making ‘Pink Noise’ felt like the most violent of emotional wrestling matches. It took three years of waiting and waiting and fighting and dying and nothingness and then finally an explosion of sound. As if it was always here this record is my most honest and unapologetic flying of the freedom flag. In my adult years I had forgotten how important dance was to me as a vital tool of my creative expression. I brought it back, just for me, so I could find my delight in dance again. And now I can’t stop dancing. I can’t wait to play this album live.”
Pink Noise Tracklist
1. “Safe Passage
2. “Conditional”
3. “Church Girl”
4. “Remedy”
5. “Magical”
6. “Pink Noise”
7. “Golden Ashes”
8. “What Matters”
9. “Got Me”
10. “Before the Dawn”
