K.Flay will release her second full-length album, Every Where Is Some Where, on April 7th on Night Street / Interscope Records (an imprint helmed by Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds). A brand-new song from the album, ‘Black Wave’ is out now, and you can watch the lyric video below.

‘Black Wave’ is “about facing something immense and menacing and choosing not to cower, but to rise up" K.Flay says in a statement that also sheds light on the album’s title. “In writing this album, I thought a lot about the places that shape us, and how, in turn, we shape those places in our minds as human beings living on earth right now. We find ourselves in a very particular situation where the planet is getting warmer, the internet is getting bigger, and the stakes are as grave as ever.”

“The President of the United States Of America is a television celebrity who openly degrades those unlike him (non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-wealthy, non-citizen), and whose chief strategist has spent much of his career promoting white nationalism in a country meant to foster diversity and progress through tolerance.”

“A president who intends to limit our freedoms, foment hatred & silence dissent and yet every place, every where, is just some place, some where. It’s all arbitrary and fucked up and sometimes lucky. I think you can understand the fact of your own smallness in this world while still celebrating the very particular singularity of who you are and where you happen to stand”

Having toured the UK in 2015 with PVRIS, K.Flay returned last summer to play at Reading & Leeds Festivals, Bestival, and also her own sold-out headline show in London at the Hoxton Bar & Kitchen. She has previously toured with artists as varied as Passion Pit, Awolnation, Snoop Dogg and Dashboard Confessional. She is currently on a three week U.S. headlining tour in support of her recent EP Crush Me, which features the Top 5 Modern Rock Radio track ‘Blood In The Cut’. If that EP is anything to go by, Every Where Is Some Where could be something very special

“The boy I love’s got another girl/ He might be fucking her right now”

The brash sexuality of lead single ‘Blood In The Cut’ is as honest and confrontational as Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Closer’ or Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Oughta Know’. Where Morissette sang over the Red Hot Chili Peppers, K.Flay provides her own backing, a blend of lo-fi pop, hip hop and electronica with live drums and guitar, while she delivers her revelatory analysis in the throaty, lazy fashion of MIA or Martina Topley-Bird.

American singer and songwriter K. Flay (Kristine Flaherty) has toured with Snoop Dogg, Passion Pit, 3Oh!3, Icona Pop, Third Eye Blind and Dashboard Confessional. She released a self-titled EP in 2010 and signed with RCA soon after. Her disparate sounds and influences ultimately lead to her leaving the label and she crowdfunded her debut album, Life As A Dog. The success of that album brought her to the attention of Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds who signed her to his Night Street label, a subdivision of Interscope, and made Crush Me the first release from his new venture.

'Blood In The Cut' starts out with a muted guitar with Flaherty's vocals sounding wounded and isolated. The quiet menace of the verse is countered by the big beats and synths that follow the chorus. It's a classic indie rock structure in the Pixies mould with overtones of a more reflective Macklemore & Lewis and culminates in a big singalong refrain. Flaherty has been bubbling under for a couple of years now and if any track can break her into the mainstream on her own terms, it's this one. It's an absolute cracker of a tune.

'Hollywood Forever' follows a similar template but with more of a swaying groove. The title of the track comes from the celebrity graveyard and the tone of the lyrics sound bitterly sarcastic. Sung differently this could be a vapid Katy Perry style celebration of celebrity but Flaherty injects the tune with mournful regret of broken dreams.

Flaherty usually produces her own records but for Crush Me she called in Nashville-based producer JT Daly, and LA-based producer Simon Says. The difference in the quality of the production between Life as a Dog and this new EP is substantial. 'Dreamers' opens with a synth line straight from the Chemical Brothers songbook. K.Flay started out playing rap clubs and 'You Felt Right' sounds more traditionally hip hop than the other tracks but where her earlier work wove between her rap beginnings and her indie sensibility, the latter has definitely won out on Crush Me. The hip hop history has made her lyrics more interesting and more inventively rhythmic than your average indie pop singer. Crush Me is K.Flay's most accomplished and coherent work to date and she has a substantial back catalogue behind her to bolster the live show. Well worth checking out if she continues to produce songs of this quality.

Crush Me is available from iTunes.