Conchis unwraps her body of work in the form of her debut body of work. "Chapters" A nurtured deep dive into the power of the unabridged human experience, raw feeling, metamorphosing, and everything it takes to do so. Available now on all streaming platforms, Chapters invites listeners on an immersive journey through loss, yearning, and healing, inspired by Conchis' profoundly personal experience with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS).
With a novel, open approach to vulnerability, Conchis restricted each vocal take to five records, resulting in an unvarnished honesty that thumps through each track. From the meditative opener "Trees Grow Higher" to the haunting closer "Calm Your Mind," Chapters read like a sonic novel, an elaborate dance between the light and the dark, the ethereal and the raw.
Inspired by John Fowles' The Magus and the mystical symbolism of the tarot's Magician card, Conchis fuses elemental sounds and disparate musical textures. Mother nature emboldens her compositions with earth, water, fire, and air, bringing a multi-layered soundscape of haunting internal reflection. Songs like "Floods" reflect environmental anxieties in tempestuous production and Fever Ray-esque tension, while "The World Is Flat" is a hypnotic retort to digital-era chaos.
Standout moments come on songs like "She Was Born" and "Stories," where Conchis' bare vocal style movingly expresses the subjects of loss and chronic illness. Her raw, blood-in-the-water performance in "She Was Born" is a tribute to her mother in memory, and "Stories," with its rising electronics, reflects waves of longing and force of will.
Concluding with the eerily prophetic "Calm Your Mind," Chapters provides its listeners with a time capsule suspended in a form of hard-fought peace. For such a slim album, its beauty lies in a harrowing balance of vulnerability and sonic depth. Conchis' debut does what few albums have ever done in musical history: It makes a household name out of a solitary voice in contemporary music who turns pain into powerful art.