Alana Yorke Announces New Album, Destroyer, Out May 17, 2024, via Paper Bag Records
In November 2022, Alana Yorke woke up one morning and realized she was unable to move her left arm. A few days (and numerous hospital tests) later, she discovered she’d had a hemorrhagic stroke that affected the right hemisphere of her brain (associated with creative expression) in the parietal lobe (responsible for receiving and filtering sensory input). What could have been an unmitigated disaster changed Yorke’s life. The previous decade had been filled with profound challenges — during a sample-gathering scuba expedition as part of her academic work, she ran out of air and subsequently developed debilitating PTSD. The stroke, however, was a serendipitous force: the psychological heaviness suddenly lifted, and Yorke found herself freed from past emotional baggage and propelled by euphoric creativity. While the album that would become Destroyer had always been part of a process of plumbing the depths, Yorke was consumed by a desire to share what she had experienced on the other side of the veil.
“The goal was to bring these images and stories back to our world,” she explains.
Destroyer is an art-pop stunner that represents both a creative triumph and a personal transformation and will be released on May 17, 2024, on Paper Bag Records. From its genesis, the album was anchored in the idea of a solitary descent to face the self and come back wholly changed. The universe of Destroyer, created in collaboration with husband and co-producer Ian Bent, is an otherworld where snapshots of Yorke’s psychic landscape are fanned out against a layered musical backdrop coloured by a 21-piece string orchestra, the ultraviolet cool of ’80’s synth-pop, the austere grace and rhythmic cadences of minimalist contemporary composers and the whole-hearted reverberation of anthems that call forth echoes from the unconscious, somewhere between the tidal forces of Kate Bush and Philip Glass. Toward the end of the gargantuan multi-year effort of making the album, Yorke’s survival of a stroke led to unparalleled experiences of existence, and an extraordinary journey of recovery. Now as she rises above the surface, Destroyer has become an offering from the depths, intended to transform emotions from her singular experience into a gift of universal resonance.
The debut track revealed today is “Marion” connecting through generations, Alana to her young son and to her grandmother. “After my grandmother’s passing I was looking through old family photo albums, and the deep brown eyes of my grandmother really spoke to me, but also the ‘green and gold’ hazel eyes of myself as a young toddler,” remarks Alana. “Eyes became a link between generations, what we share in ways that are difficult to understand, and how a loved one can continue to live on through us. The intensity of the music and the vocals is an expression of the grief I was feeling. When we produced this song, we created so many beats, tracked drum parts, edited them, and later in the process we ended up peeling almost everything back to reveal the vocal and piano. When the strings were tracked, the new arrangement made sense, and had a new power that was more confident than expected.” The accompanying video, shot in Indian Harbour, sees Alana in a striking Atlantic ocean-facing vista channeling modern expressionist dance.
“Kerri Heslop (choreographer) and I were really inspired by the modern expressionists like Martha Graham and Pina Bausch, and by the bodywork of Joseph Pilates that was such a vital part of my recovery from my stroke. I wanted a landscape that was focal, and I wanted to come up out of the earth and disappear back into it. This represents our emergence into life (birth), and the return to the earth (death), and the meaning and lyrics of the song mirror that perfectly. Expressing this song through movement was such a vital way to inhabit my recovered body and say, ‘I’m here!’ and Kerri was simply invaluable in the physical and visual realization of that vision.”
In Yorke’s case, music has always been a foundational mode of connection. Before she could write out sentences, she intuitively knew how to express herself through song. At age four or five, she would sit at the piano, a prodigiously talented preschooler picking out the black and white keys that would allow her to translate her innermost feelings into melodies. As Yorke grew older and grappled with the complexities of coming of age in a small village on Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy, music became as much a mode of survival as it was a form of creative expression. Over time, she found new tools — guitar, vocal timbre and tone, the subtleties of lyrics, the power and nuances of production — and discovered she had a knack for distilling those emotional missives into dreamy, percussive hooks. To this day, Yorke’s songs hold the function they did for her as a child: they’re portals to share experiences that can’t be contained in language, outlets for conveying a particular mood or dream or reflection.
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