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Doors open at 8PM | Show starts at 9PM | 18+ | $20 Advance | $23 Day of Show | $35 Reserved Balcony

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The Nonesuch debut of Hurray for the Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra), Life on Earth, out February 18, 2022, is a departure for the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based singer/songwriter. Its eleven new “nature punk” tracks on the theme of survival are music for a world in flux—songs about thriving, not just surviving, while disaster is happening.

For her eighth full-length album, Segarra (they/she) drew inspiration from The Clash, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Bad Bunny, and the author of Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown. Recorded during the pandemic, Life on Earth was produced by Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver, Kevin Morby).

Life on Earth’s first single, “RHODODENDRON,” is about “finding rebellion in plant life. Being called by the natural world and seeing the life that surrounds you in a way you never have. A mind expansion. A psychedelic trip. A spiritual breakthrough. Learning to adapt, and being open to the wisdom of your landscape. Being called to fix things in your own backyard, your own community,” says Segarra.

Of the “Rhododendron” video, which was directed by New Orleans-based artist Lucia Honey, Segarra says: “It is really far out and fun. I got this bodysuit that just looks like the inside of the human body. It looks like you’re skinless. It’s in a scene where I’m playing to an audience of plants. Just really absurd, but I put that suit on and I was like man, this feels really good. It feels like, ‘This is who I am. Let’s just take the skin off.’

“It reminds me a little bit of Kids in the Hall,” they continue. “With this ‘Rhododendron’ shoot, something clicked in me where I was like, ‘All I have to do is be myself.’ I had been thinking that I had to be something bigger than myself. I felt like I was just never quite making the mark and then something clicked where I was like, ‘I just gotta be me. I could do that. I could show up and be me. And if people don’t like it, then I don’t know what to fucking tell them.’ It was like a brain shift of, ‘Oh, this can be fun. It doesn’t have to be suffering.’ With so many videos and photo shoots before, it really felt like suffering. I felt so uncomfortable being perceived. I didn’t know who I was.”

Alynda Segarra was born and raised in the Bronx, which they left at the age of seventeen, running away from everything and everyone they knew, hopping freight trains or hitchhiking across the country in the company of a band of street urchins. Segarra moved to New Orleans in 2007 and formed two bands: Dead Man’s Street Orchestra and Hurray for the Riff Raff. In 2015, Segarra decamped to Nashville, then to New York, to make her most recent album, 2016’s critically praised The Navigator, an ambitious and fully realized concept album that was her quest to reclaim her Puerto Rican identity. Segarra’s previous records as Hurray for the Riff Raff are Crossing the Rubicon (EP, 2007), It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You (2008), Young Blood Blues (2010), Hurray for the Riff Raff (2011), Look Out Mama (2012), My Dearest Darkest Neighbor (2013), and Small Town Heroes (2014).

If each song on Anjimile Chithambo’s introspective 2020 debut, Giver Taker, was its own self- contained micro-journey of grief, hope, and identity, then their subsequent orchestral Reunion is fitting as a homecoming. It’s almost an extension, or sequel, to the ideas of rebirth Chithambo began excavating last year—a simultaneous resettling into, and reimagining of, their songwriting.

Reunion features airy, emotive string compositions from the Los Angeles-based musician and composer Daniel Hart, known for his work with bands like Polyphonic Spree and St. Vincent, as well as his film scoring work for Pete’s Dragon and A Ghost Story. Here, Anjimile’s songs are built out with violins and guest vocalists. Fellow indie musicians Jay Som, SASAMI, and Lomelda lend their voices to the three tracks, which also feature the same backing vocals from major Giver Taker collaborator Justine Bowe of Photocomfort. The framework of Anjimile’s pastoral, compelling songs blooms into something cinematic and swelling on this EP, a loving and hopeful tangle of discovery.

Chithambo was struck by the new interpretations of his songwriting, the way they resonated with him, and the feeling of hearing a truthful translation of your own words through someone else’s delivery. He explains of his collaborators: “Their sensitive and thoughtful interpretations of these songs give me the feeling that we’re connected, and that we know each other on a deeper level - the same internal place from which music moves us all.”

Jay Som’s “In Your Eyes (Reflection)” feels like looking into a mirror, and the sensation of truly being seen for what you are by another person. It’s the original song taken and gently shifted to her point of view. “Maker (Refraction),” as handled by SASAMI, skews psychedelic, a tangle of phased-out vocals and disorientingly beautiful harmonies; she takes Anjimile’s songwriting and refracts it through her own artistic lens. And Lomelda’s “1978 (Reunion)” is strikingly tender. For Anjimile, Lomelda’s take feels like the original song being brought to its purest essence of sweet, sad hopefulness - which rings through in Lomelda’s singing like the clearest bell.

It also speaks to the striking honesty of Chithambo’s lyrics and songwriting, and its ability to resonate so deeply, regardless of form. Even when sung from a different mouth and made anew, the music is still distinctly Chithambo’s voice.

For Chithambo, hearing their songs anew felt like some sort of metaphysical reunion between themself and SASAMI, Jay Som, and Lomelda. The EP also marks a reunion for Chithambo and their beloved label, Father/Daughter, as well as the reunion with their close friend and collaborator Bowe, while binding together songs from Giver Taker in a new form.

“I think of reunions as something either explicitly celebratory: family reunion, holiday, wedding, a joyful event—or something explicitly elegiac, like a funeral or memorial,” Chithambo explains. “I feel like this dichotomy is a subtle nod to the dichotomy of human existence & human emotionality that Giver Taker suggests.”