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Apr 07, 2022 By Caleb Campbell

Indie singer/songwriter Lindsey Rose Black debuted earlier this year with her playful first single “Clutch.” Pulling from emotive singer/songwriter touchstones like Maggie Rogers, Lana Del Rey, and Norah Jones, Black’s music is both affecting and alluring, exploring grief and loss through stirring songwriting and raw smoky vocals.

On her forthcoming debut EP, SUBTERRA, Black paired with producers John Velasquez (Zella Day, Ella Vos) and Matthew Frazier (Local Natives) to bring potent weight to her confessions. With them, Black has composed moments of immaculate beauty and quiet devastation. Today she’s back with her second single from the EP, “Violet,” premiering early with Under the Radar.

Like much of her forthcoming EP, “Violet” is about grief. Its presentation is stark and simple, with only swirling guitar chords to accompany Black’s vocals. However, Black wrenches every ounce of piercing emotions from her vocal performance, capturing the seemingly endless black hole grief can leave in one’s life. For Black, grief is a towering inward fountain, constantly pouring with no end in sight一 “But it’s pouring inside / It’s pouring inside / This violet grief / It’s pouring inside / It’s pouring inside / And I can’t breathe.“

Black explains of the song, “I lost my dearest friend, my grandmother Dale, in June of 2020 and my world immediately froze and fell off its axis. It was jarring, then, to discover the rest of the world somehow did not and would not stop. Focused on just putting one foot in front of the other, I went on countless hikes in those first six months of loss. Everything was so piercing and immediate – seasons shifting, flowers opening, sunlight and shadows on my skin. I felt the natural world whispering how to continue on and bend toward the light in a new way, and ‘Violet’ is one outcome of that ongoing process. Grief is both the most violent and tender collaborator I’ve ever known.”

She continues, saying of the video, “Matthew and I both recently lost loved ones and, in trying to capture the feeling of moving through waves and stages of grief, somehow arrived at the idea of trying on glasses and never finding the right lens to ‘fix’ an impossible reality. We were so inspired by music videos like Radiohead’s ‘No Surprises,’ Moses Sumney’s ‘Polly,’ and Sinéad O’Connor’s version of ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ — simple, tight shots of artists giving difficult emotions space to roam.”

Check out the song and video below.