Listen: Katie Gately – ‘Bracer’

Electronic musician and producer Katie Gately announces her second album, ‘Loom’, out February 14th on Houndstooth, and shares the lead single, “Bracer.”

Following remix work for Björk and Zola Jesus, productions for serpentwithfeet, and her debut album on Tri-Angle, ‘Loom’ is a remarkable album, dedicated to Katie’s mother who passed away in 2018 due to a rare form of cancer. Gately channels her loss through a multitude of sounds and samples, including seismic rumbles and earthquake recordings alongside her signature adventurous sound design and unexpected earworm melodies, signifying how grief like this is like the shifting of the earth. 

Where her debut album, 2016’s ‘Color’, deployed fractured rhythms, fierce licks, bold samples and paintbox pop hooks, ‘Loom’reveals crepuscular textures. Her voice is more forward in the mix, often densely layered in choral laments above a coarse foundation of hard and brittle sound design, the latter of which is rooted in her film school training. As well as earthquake sounds, Loom includes more samples chosen for their associative power – peacocks screaming, pill bottles shaking, wolves howling, a shovel digging, a paper shredder, stone grinding and heavily processed audio from her parent’s wedding. 

At the time of her mother’s diagnosis, Katie was near completion of an entirely different album but says that very quickly she realized she “didn’t have the bandwidth to make that record anymore.” She returned from LA to her family home in Brooklyn and started again, completely rebuilding the album around the track “Bracer,” which was her mother’s favourite. The track samples a variety of both imaginative and more mundane sounds – a coffin closing, elephant trumpets, a machine gun, meat smacking, and a cantaloupe being stabbed. 

‘Loom’ is a record that is powered more by heart than mind, with sucker-punch richness and keening vocals that are unflinching. Tracks like “Bracer”are “about being disoriented and wanting to check out with a substance – I used whiskey,” says Katie. 

“Bracer” reaches for a series of climaxes that drop out before they can peak. The accompanying visual created by Brian Cantrell reflects the intensely personal nature of the piece, and the prompt for a visual that evokes interiority, eventual growth, and biology brought to mind the image of a biological specimen viewed through the screen noise of a scientific instrument. 

Stream “Bracer” & pre-order ‘Loom’ – https://hndsth.lnk.to/KatieGately