Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Annie Blackman has been writing her way into and out of heartache since adolescence. She crafts stirringly vulnerable music to bridge the gap between the head and the heart, and untangles what it means to want. Blackman does just that on her beautiful, forthcoming EP entitled Bug, announced today and out on April 28th via Father/Daughter Records.

Pre-order Bug Here

To celebrate the announcement of Bug, Annie Blackman shares the EP’s first single, “Ash.” The song is a  vivid take on a bad date with “one hell of an introvert,” and ends with an address to an entirely different listener: “My asbestos-cut confessional/Out loud to you at last,” Blackman sings, turning an admission into a confrontation, and further complicating an already fraught dynamic. The delicate finger-picking of an acoustic guitar dances alongside a woebegone slide, vacillating between folk and pop.

The stories on Bug find Blackman more or less where All of It left off—a no less clear-eyed a look at post-college anxiety, but its scale is smaller, tethered more to whispered conversations in Brooklyn bedrooms than the wide, unknowable horizon. She lingers on overclocked AC units, tangled top sheets, bugs in pre-war bathtubs.

Blackman’s new EP, Bug, is the rarest sort of diary, a collection of songs that privileges what’s messy and true over any perfect image of the past. This is part of what makes her such an expert chronicler of what you might call the “situationship”—the romantic posture that’s neither here nor there, that refuses to be pinned down. 

For Annie Blackman, the idea of the bug represents “a play within a play within a scene”—another nod to those frames within frames, a gesture of distance and dimension. “I’m not your girlfriend/But I’m a lot of little things,” she sings on the title track, channeling the observational power of Katy Kirby and the plaintive, fairytale fantasies of early Taylor Swift. The EP’s climax arrives as Blackman closes with a repeated question to a lover, at once soft and urgent, earthbound and ecstatic: “What would you do to me/If you could do anything to me?” It adds up to something that’s as transportive as anything Blackman has ever written, the experience of captured memories at their richest and most alive.

Photo Courtesy: Tonje Thilesen