Birthmark (Nate Kinsella) is excited to share a music video double feature, with self-directed visual accompaniments for the singles “Snowflake In My Palm (Not For Long)” and “Butterfly”. Both songs come from the brand new album Birth of Omni, out now on Polyvinyl Record Co. “The video for ‘Snowflake In My Palm…’ gives me a similar feeling to having a newborn baby,” shares Kinsella. “And ‘Butterfly’ is about my desire to divorce from the gender party I was born into. I’m comfortable with my gender, but am horrified that some of us are absolute monsters. In the video, the ogres are defeated by the fearless fairies who save their baby from indoctrination.”

Birth of Omni began in the dark. Five years ago, when Nate Kinsella began writing his fifth album under the name Birthmark, his world, like that of so many others, felt upside down. This was early 2018, a year into the Trump presidency and amid the ubiquitous American fever of mass shootings and racist violence. Just months earlier, the dawning revelations of the MeToo movement had jolted him, ending his naivete and giving him insight into how the women in his life often saw the men in theirs. Nearing 40, he was finally a father, too, with a newborn daughter and another on the way. Into what kind of world, he sensibly wondered, was he bringing these kids? Early songs wallowed in this anxious question, the dim start of what he thought might be a not-especially-uplifting EP.

But five years later, Birth of Omni is a kaleidoscopic wonder of sound and sentiment, asking the same question Kinsella first posed for himself but arriving at a surprising answer—maybe a better world, in fact, if only we can all be a little more open. Opportunities to grieve and fret overflowed, he reckoned, but he also wanted to celebrate the possibility of change, the joy of wonder, the essence of being. The result is the most dazzling and dynamic album of his storied career, with heavy beats and heavenly harps, cascading harmonies and quiet hymns, brutal noise and blissful arpeggios woven into 10 songs that capture the highs and lows, the vexations and victories of marriage, parenthood, and life itself.

The sequence of upending events that yielded those first sketches didn’t end, of course. But when the pandemic began two years into work on Birth of Omni, Kinsella took its suspension of reality as an invitation to forget his own rules. He warped his voice with software until he questioned if it was still his, fluttering as it did through electric fractals or stretched until it seemed to trickle with sweat. And in a series of residencies in isolated cabins and the New York City art space Pioneer Works, he dove in and out of genres like never before, fusing ASMR readings and sampled voicemails to mutated disco and cherubic pop and orchestral emoting. A panoply of guests and friends—Arone Dyer, Greg Fox, Jeff Tobias, Richmond’s Spacebomb crew, among many others—helped him reach these unexpected syntheses.

Vulnerability and self-reckoning is the point of Birth of Omni, to make yourself and hopefully your kids and maybe even the world a little better by being honest about and open with yourself. Kinsella wrote, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered this album alone, because these are notes to self, personal reminders of how he wants to exist moving forward. Birth of Omni began in the dark, but it exists now in the full light of an essential reality: Our roles change, as do we. There’s hope in knowing there’s still somewhere else to go.