[Cover photo credit to Steph Alexis]
New York-based Gothic Folk singer/songwriter Kira McSpice has announced The House, her upcoming album and third full-length release of 2026. Out October 23, 2026, via Danger Collective, it is the third installment of her four-part series, A Return in 4 Parts.
The series “documents a trance-like desert journey to a house” that resembles McSpice’s childhood home in Harlem, Georgia. Recently, she shared the lead single, “Return”, which is “a recognition of her early exposure to grief, offset by a pure, childlike wonder that can only come back to her in ephemeral glimpses.”
The story behind this project is steeped in the events of McSpice’s life. In preparation for her Saturn return, McSpice sought help from breathwork facilitator and hypnotherapist Trina Merz, who guided her through a trance that took her on a spiritual trek, revisiting the past and giving her tools to navigate the next phase of her life. This journey led her to a train she rode to the desert, where, upon arrival, she stumbled upon a recreation of her childhood home, which her family and her left at 13.
From this experience came four albums-worth of material, moving between Gothic Folk, Alternative Rock, Ambient, and Chamber music, including “a makeshift choir of mutual friends symbolizing the community she had in her old stomping grounds and the spiritual entities that call her back to her childhood.”
Regarding “Return”, McSpice says:
In this song, I sing about arriving at my childhood home and reflecting on the memories I had there, as well as where I live now and how that house holds so much too. I remembered my dad told me, ‘You leave you can never come back!’ so many times when he was yelling at me and I would tell him I was going to run away. I guess he was right. I couldn’t really ever come back once I left. It’s very different now, and it is not my home, but it felt important to be standing there in front of the house feeling how much it held inside its walls.
The new single is accompanied by a music video directed by Brandon Brumm and filmed at the church-turned-community space The Granite Church in Redding, Connecticut, where she recorded the album with co-producers and frequent collaborators Sean Brennan and Tyler Skoglund.
McSpice explains about the video:
There was a moment at the end of filming where I did an improv dance in the dark with the sister dancers Rainey and Anabelle Scarborough [the Sun and the Moon]. We did this together, and I felt so open and like I was exactly where I needed to be. I was so incredibly happy to be there with everyone dancing to this song that is so meaningful to me.
Brumm adds:
Like the memories of an old family house, ‘Return’ is haunted by nostalgia. This nostalgia is the pain of never truly being able to return home. This place we might have once outgrew, lives on in the mind as a phantom…And yet, while the past may haunt us indefinitely, we have the choice to glean what we can from it and to live on anyway. One can never step in the same river twice, for good or for ill, and it was this complexity that struck a major chord with me when I first encountered the track.
