Rachel Lime releases “Nacrée,” the second single from her forthcoming album, STORIES, now available via streamin platforms
Lime says: “This is a spring 2020 lockdown song I wrote about desire when I wasn’t able to fulfill it. The lyrics are completely unaltered from that first iphone notes app draft and I built the song around the words, playing around with sampling my own vocals, sighs, breaths. I wanted sounds that brought to life the lyrics, the ‘long blue afternoon’ and ‘sea and milk,’ the ‘black strand’ of the seashore as evening falls. Water, and specifically the ocean, has always had such a sensual, sexual connotation for me—the salt! The grit of sand on your skin. The sun and water touching every part of you. It’s funny because I’m definitely repressed in that I struggle to take myself seriously singing a, idk, kind of sexy song, but it’s exactly this kind of boldness I wanted to bring to this album. Less lonely, intellectual pining—more risk and drama.”

A collection of fables, the songs on STORIES carry forward themes of longing, of fantasy, of the kind of fiction that is all the more real for not being biographically true. They are a call for listeners to recall half-glimpsed memories and myths, from childhood and beyond. The album’s first single, “Elided,” is based on the fantasy/speculative fiction book The Traitor Baru Cormorant; “Water Lily Bloom” is from the imagined perspective of the Lady of Shalott trapped in her castle; “Jangdan” samples traditional Korean pansori vocals; “Wild Raspberries,” is a rescued track from when Lime was 19, composing on GarageBand using her laptop keyboard as a MIDI input, and so forth.

Mixed by Brian Tench (Kate Bush) and mastered by Nicholas Bolton. Lime says: “It is an album about protagonists who seek pleasure, who are afraid of it, who are intoxicated by it, who grieve the loss of it. I wanted to create an album that situates the listener fully in their body, while still playing with the literary, cerebral themes I explored in my earlier work.”

order STORIES by Rachel Lime HERE