[Cover photo credit to Grace Conrad]

Visual and musical artist Anastasia Coope has announced her debut album, Darning Woman, for release on May 31, 2024 via her new label home, Jagjaguwar. In addition, Coope has shared her first single, “He Is On His Way Home, We Don’t Live Together.” It’s accompanied by a music video directed by Grace Conrad.

Coope’s upcoming album conveys “surrealist psychedelia” that “evokes a precipice beyond the material world.”

Anastasia Coope will perform at 2220 Arts + Archives in Los Angeles on March 13. Her album release party will take place at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, NY on May 31. She will also be performing with Sub Pop singer/songwriter Lael Neale April 12 at Public Records, NY and April 13 at Lilypad in Cambridge, MA, with UK dates to follow in the autumn.

The Brooklyn-based artist was raised in the village of Cold Spring, NY and the Hudson Valley’s “wintry landscapes and small towns” impact Darning Woman.

While staying at a relative’s vacant home in Beacon, NY, Coope began experimenting with recording software in an empty living room, singing directly into the open space. Up until that point, she had mainly thought of herself as a visual artist. Throughout the next year, she taught herself to sing in different styles.

She shares:

I was able to envision a room of things happening, rather than me just building something. This album was me beginning to think spatially about music.

The word “woman” also appears repeatedly throughout the album’s song titles. For Coope, it was an “unconscious motif.”

She adds:

On this album, the word ‘woman’ represents the idea of a muse, or an idol, or an icon. It was a mixture of the maternal with the idea of a character, a star.

Coope was sonically inspired by the avant-garde art-rock of the ‘80s, medieval choruses and church choirs, contemporary Folk, and the close-harmonies groups of the ‘50s.