After two years of touring and writing tirelessly, Brooklyn-based Sapphic folk artist Gemma Laurence is ready to announce her third and forthcoming album, We Were Bodies Underwater, due out Summer 2025 via MainFactor and Mad Dragon Records. At its core, We Were Bodies Underwater is a story of finding softness in harsh places, love and tenderness in trauma’s wake. Following the arc of two lovers’ lives, Laurence paints a series of nine vignettes with visceral detail: the skin’s first shock of desire, the tongue’s taste of blood, the stomach’s pit of longing. Sweeping and cinematic, the album pulls listeners into a universe where the past bleeds into the present, where the streets of Brooklyn melt into the open Oklahoma plains, and where nothing is ever truly forgotten.
With the album announcement, she shares an unforgettable lead single, “Bloodlines.”
“Bloodlines” tells a story of nostalgia and trauma, centered around two lovers intertwined in each others’ grasp. Combining her folk background with her love of alt-country and early 00’s rock, Laurence leans into a grungier, twangier sound on her latest offering. Electric guitars wail and shriek in one moment then cut out in the next; pedal steel croons in the distance while mandolin melodies fall like water through a wash of harmonies; banjo-driven rhythms propel the song forward and a pulsing kick drum beats on with a grounding force. And soaring over everything, Laurence’s lilting dulcet twang takes the center stage.
With the single release, Laurence shares a music video directed by Ross Page and co-written and produced by Page and herself. Shot on Super 8, the music video has a timeless feel to it, capturing two lovers building a home together. Everything seems picture-perfect… until the world they’ve created grows more and more strange, and a darker, almost Lynchian, scene unfolds. Trapped in an uncanny valley of memory and fantasy, of what was and what could have been, the two dancers spin effortlessly through a liminal space in the shape of a home.
Ephemeral and elegiac, gut-wrenching and life-affirming, “Bloodlines” tells a story of love and its aftermath, and how the past lives on within us.
