• News

• All

Dec 16, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Roxanne Turpen

North Carolina-based singer/songwriter Skylar Gudasz returned earlier this year with her third full-length album, COUNTRY. Gudasz debuted in 2016 with her first solo LP, Oleander, and her 2020 album, Cinema. In the intervening years, she also has spent time playing backup in the live bands for Hiss Golden Messenger, Eric Bachmann, and Big Star’s Third. Her latest album finds Gudasz moving between earthen shades of folk, smokey rock grooves, and shimmering art pop, rendering each moment in cinematic instrumental sprawls.

Today, following the album’s release Gudasz is back with an accompanying video for the album’s closer, “No Body,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“No Body” acts as the album’s quiet and haunting denouement, with Gudasz’s vocals lilting gently above a solitary piano line. The track’s shifts are subtle and understated. Distant strings and simmering basslines churn in the track’s margins, slowly dancing with Gudasz in a spectral swirl of instrumentation. Amidst it all, Gudasz puts an unerring spotlight on her vocals, leaving them awash in a cold wintry shine. Meanwhile, her lyrics unravel long-held tropes of femininity, searching for her place in her own grand narrative: “I am not the wife / I will not be waiting / I am not the woman / Confined to the island / What do I know of weaving? / I have been with the witches / I have given my name / To the monster to say / No, no body, no, no body, no man.”

The accompanying video casts Gudasz in a similarly chilly light, watching as the video’s icy blues give way to hints of light and bursts of graceful movement. Gudasz explains of the video, “The record COUNTRY is all about the inherent wilderness in us all, the folly of human borders in the face of the power of nature. In this spirit, this video was filmed in the old Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station, which sits right at the edge of the ocean on the ever changing sands of the Outer Banks in North Carolina. The film is a companion piece to the video we made for Lovestorypastlife (which features the life savers), and is a more introspective, internal exploration of mythology and hero and identity. Especially as women—where do we see ourselves in stories, and how does it liberate us or limit us or carry us forward through the past? In this era of climate crisis, where displacement will continue through storms, the idea of home will change for everyone: Home is the shoreline / The question this ship seems to be ever evading.”

Check out the song and video below. COUNTRY is out everywhere now.