GEOWULF announces new album “The Child”, shares striking single “Memory Serves Like Lightning”
October 11, 2024 BY Bailey Vigliaturo
Today, Geowulf aka songwriter and musician Star Kendrick announces her new album, and her first as a solo artist, “The Child”, due for release January 17th on Nettwerk. The announcement is marked with the release of a poignant focal piece single “Memory Serves Like Lightning”.
“Memory Serves Like Lightning,” is a hypnotic indie-rock song that deals with PTSD and trauma with empathy and steely resolve. “Memory serves like lightning when you come back to haunt me/Memory serves like lightning when you can’t change things,” Kendrick sings, her emotions in a constant lockstep between fight and flight. A great encapsulation of the resplendent, emotionally resonant new album; a record that meets the higher stakes of growth with unprecedented honesty and a firmly trained eye.
“I feel like this album is my most personal lyrically – I’m talking about becoming a mum, as well as my own family,” she says. Across “The Child’s” timeless-sounding psych-pop songs, Kendrick sings of friendships, familial ties and new motherhood with clarity and profound confidence. “I’ve written a lot about heartbreak and relationships in the past, and I think on this album I finally found the space where I could tell more personal stories” she explains.
Kendrick uses her fractured childhood as a lens through which to explore what kind of mother she wants to be. One such song was “Stay Baby,” a gorgeous song written from the perspective of Kendrick’s mother. With her trademark openness, Kendrick imagines what her experience of pregnancy may have been like, conjuring a finely tuned character study in the process. “I liked that the chorus is a different world from the verse – it changes tone a bit, asking this person to stay and be around,” she says. “It was written from the perspective of my mum and imagining what she must have been going through when she had me.”
Written largely in 2023, when Kendrick was six months pregnant with her first child, “The Child” came from a period in which she had to take stock of her life thus far and make some hard decisions about what she wanted to do with her future. “When I was writing about relationship stuff and romance, it was important, but it was also kind of a bandaid – I was essentially distracting myself by writing about failures and f***boys,” she says. “The Child”, as a title, refers both to Kendrick’s new baby as well as the child she herself once was, and all that child endured to get to where Kendrick is today. “This album was a lot of me trying to work out what my new life would look like as a mother, and, through that, processing stuff from when I was a child.”
On her first two albums as Geowulf, Kendrick wrote witty, timeworn tales of love and heartbreak, dressing up modern millennial fables in the sounds of dreampop and indie-folk. Working with her friend and longtime collaborator Toma Banjanin, Kendrick carved out a distinctive sound that could be arid, raw, spiritual and pop-focused all at once. A lot has changed in the five years since the release of Geowulf’s 2019 album “My Resignation”. The world is different now, and so is Kendrick, who, since that album was released, parted ways (amicably!) with Banjanin, trained to become a social worker, and had a baby. With those giant, tectonic changes comes “The Child”.
Elsewhere on the record, Kendrick ponders whether her dreams of success in music will always be at odds with motherhood. On the dazed lullaby “Dreaming,” she asks: “If I could let myself dream, would anybody stop me?” – thereby imagining a world in which women aren’t hamstrung by patriarchal impulses to make women choose between a career or having a child. “I wrote this before I had the baby, and I had sort of been on the fence about whether I wanted a child. On this song, I was working it out – like, is a child compatible with my career?”
These unanswerable questions swirl around “The Child”, and although Kendrick rarely comes up with solid answers, there’s comfort and intense power in the fact that she’s asking them at all. Resolute and rippling with the kind of confidence an artist can only gain by striking out alone, The Child heralds a new era of Geowulf, and of Star Kendrick.
