Pearla (aka Brooklyn-based artist Nicole Rodriguez) today shares her ethereal new single “The Place With No Weather,” off her forthcoming debut album Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming (Spacebomb Records), out on February 10th, 2023. “I was thinking about outer space, and I was imagining all of the different possible ways for life to take form,” she explains of the song, which showcases her strong, silvery vocals. “I was feeling really stuck in my body, and sensitive to my surroundings. I wondered what it would be like to be free from that, from all earthly limitations, to feel your soul stretch out and take on some other form. It’s in many ways about social anxiety, and being around someone who makes you feel very small. And wishing to be something other than human, maybe a light or a floaty cloud, if only for just a second.” Pearla, recently featured by Rough Trade as an artist ‘On The Rise,’ will perform next at a hometown Union Pool show this Friday, October 21st. Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming is now available for pre-order.

Pearla’s music radiates with indiscriminate awe. Whether it’s the befuddling depths of nature or the profoundly strange spark of a dreaming mind—she takes it all as equal magic. Her debut album is populated by eccentric creatures and quixotic scenes, her takes on mortality, intimacy, and personal freeness glowing with an air of mystique. Oh Glistening Onion… is a world unto itself. 

Pearla’s personal curiosities include finger puppets, writing songs with children, Virginia Woolf’s prose, and consulting the I Ching. She makes music the same way she moves through the world: mystified. On her 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities (a collection praised as “music worth getting lost in” by NPR Music) she posed existential questions like outlines in a coloring book, and scribbled in attempts at answers through off-kilter indie pop and a bewildered spirit. But on her highly anticipated full-length, arriving three contemplative years later, Pearla submits to the brilliance in not knowing.