Claire Cronin – “Bloodless”Claire Cronin – “Bloodless”

A couple years ago, the writer and musician Claire Cronin released her haunting album, Big Dread Moon. Last year, she published a memoir called Blue Light Of The Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, And God. Today, she’s announcing another full-length, Bloodless, which will be out in November. She’s introducing it with the lumbering title track. “Must be strange not to see skin and bones/ To mistrust the light — terrible,” she sings in its opening lines. “I know I’m a man, thorn in my eye/ And my mind is unbearable.”

Here’s Cronin on her new album, which she recorded with her collaborator and husband Ezra Buchla:

Some days, the air was so toxic that we couldn’t leave the house. Days passed indoors with our air filters going, while the sky outside was orange and dark from morning until dusk. The recording process was almost hallucinatory — I would lose my sense of time in the music’s repetition and the heat of the tiny room where I was playing. The photo on the record cover is from this time.

I felt trapped and hopeless and terrified — of the virus, of the fires, of what was going on in American politics. In some ways, death felt far away — numbers of fatalities on the news — but it was also a constant threat. When I found out I was pregnant at the end of July, I had an even more heightened awareness of life and death. Most of my parts on the record had been finished by then, though, so the record isn’t about the pregnancy.

Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Bloodless”
02 “Through The Walls”
03 “Feel This”
04 “Snakes For Angels”
05 “No Forcefield”
06 “I Could Not Let Blood”
07 “To Ferry Across”
08 “Not A Noise”
09 “Now I Don’t Leave”

Bloodless is out 11/12 via Orindal Records. Pre-order it here.