Anxiety spirals triggering apocalypses. Queer cannibals devouring each other. Hysterical heartbroken women turning into dogs. Satan on a really bad date.
Camie is taking listeners on a techno-symphonic journey through the gritty underbelly of her heart, mind, body, and fantasies on her latest album Poems In The Ashes. Coming as the Toronto alternative singer/songwriter’s sophomore release, Poems In The Ashes is a bold showcase of Camie’s transformative musical prowess. The artist’s fascinating, singular juxtaposition of wildly open and vulnerable lyrics with her ultra-modern, yet unabashedly rock & roll style, is bound to send shock waves through the Toronto music scene and beyond. The third single, “Genesis 3,” is out now.
“I wrote and recorded this album in a two-year period, following multiple pandemic-time lockdowns, when I felt ugly, lost, and disoriented by the new world that I was easing into,” Camie recalls. “I had just moved to a new city (Toronto) at twenty-four years old and I didn’t know who I was. I was horribly depressed and anxious. I was working through the most formative heartbreak of my early twenties. I was grappling with my queerness and going on a lot of terrible dates.”
“I had just released my first critically acclaimed, award-winning record, entitled “troubadour” (2021), which was a cinematic, romantic, and dreamy ambient folk record. Releasing that album was strange because I felt like those sonics, and poetics no longer suited my volatile mental and emotional states. I knew that, for my next record, I wanted to do a complete genre shift to account for everything that I was feeling and experiencing. Thus, Poems In The Ashes was born.”
Charting a personal journey from anxiety and self-destruction to catharsis and power, the resulting record is a celebration of the strange, surreal, and serpentine motions of queer womanhood. Blending high fantasy with moments of personal epiphany, transformation, and revelation, each song takes a new, queer, and feminist spin on a different psycho-sexy horror trope. Poems In The Ashes is an album for and about queer women stepping into their desires no matter how taboo, and reclaiming their full identities from outmoded belief systems that warn desire and sexuality are not “for” you.
“I decided to process all of these ugly emotions and experiences in the best way I knew how: by telling stories,” Camie says. “Blending the fantastical and the speculative with my real-world experiences, creating this album felt like a lifeline for me. In writing these songs, I thought a lot about the poetics of excess—hysteria, horror, pleasure, madness, ecstasy, and rapture—and how these things manifest at the limits of human bodies and emotions.”
“These are emotions that everyone experiences in various capacities, but they’re things often seen as “too much” (especially when expressed by queer women), taboo, or shameful. This record allowed me to reclaim my body, my emotions, and my physical and spiritual lives. Now, with this release, all that catharsis can be yours.”
