• News

• All

Jun 23, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Lissyelle Laricchia

Half Waif (aka Nandi Rose) is releasing a new album, Mythopoetics, on July 9 via ANTI-. Now she has shared another song from the album, “Horse Racing.” Listen below, followed by her upcoming tour dates.

The song was written at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Rose had this to say about it in a press release: “I started writing ‘Horse Racing’ in an Airbnb in Brooklyn that week in March 2020 when everything got really real. Alone in an unfamiliar apartment, as an unseen force took over our lives, I was struck by how much of a wake-up call it all was. How we were being shaken by our shoulders and told to face something really ugly and monstrous about our ways of being. It felt like we were race horses who had only just realized we were on a track, going around again and again. There’s no end in a circle. And maybe now that we recognized this, we could break out of it, bust right out of the ring—which is what the end section feels like sonically to me. A shot at freedom.”

Mythopoetics features “Take Away the Ache” (a new song shared in April), as well as “Orange Blossoms” and “Party’s Over,” two songs released as a 7-inch in February. When the album was announced Half Waif shared another song from it, “Swimmer,” via a video. That was followed by “Sodium & Cigarettes,” which made our Songs of the Week list.

Rose is based in the Hudson Valley area of New York. For Mythopoetics she once again collaborated with multi-instrumentalist, film composer, and producer Zubin Hensler. The original intention was to take part in a recording residency at Pulp Arts in Gainesville, Florida to record stripped-back recordings of old songs, with just Rose on piano, but then it evolved into the new album.

“This is the record I’ve been trying to make for 10 years,” Rose said in a previous press release. “My voice is changing, and my confidence has reached a point where I feel that I can sing however I want; I’ve finally come to a place where I don’t have to conform to what I think other people want it to sound like.”

Her last album as Half Waif was The Caretaker, which came out in March of 2020 on ANTI-.

We interviewed Rose as a part of our Why Not Both podcast.

Half Waif Tour Dates:

11/2 - Los Angeles, CA @ The Echo *
11/3 - San Francisco, CA @ The Chapel *
11/5 - Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios *
11/6 - Seattle, WA @ Barboza *
11/7 - Vancouver, BC @ The Wise *
11/13 - Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s ^
11/14 - Washington, DC @ Songbyrd ^
11/15 - New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom ^
11/16 - Boston, MA @ Sonia ^
11/18 - Montreal, QC @ Bar le Ritz ^
11/19 - Toronto, ON @ Drake Hotel ^
11/21 - Chicago, IL @ Schubas ^

* w/ Lisel & Booker Stardrum
^ w/ Lightning Bug

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.