SRSQ’s Kennedy Ashlyn masterfully synthesizes her private struggles and sorrows into stirring, redemptive anthems. Her multi-octave range and mood swings songcraft consists of tumult and triumph, darkest night breaking into brightest dawn, proving her a musician of elemental force.

Her new single “Used To Love” is “about trying to rekindle a dying flame, about mourning a thing you have not yet lost but can feel slipping away,” Ashlyn reveals. “It’s simultaneously very personal, yet universally relevant as we all seek to hold on to our most precious people and moments.”

Ashlyn’s second album Ever Crashing is the summation of a nearly three-year journey of soul searching, songwriting, and self-discovery. The album began materializing in the wake of an ADHD and bipolar disorder diagnosis, prompting a profound personal overhaul. 

Every song hits like a single, heaving with guitar, synth, strings, live drums, and oceans of Ashlyn’s astounding voice, balletic and illuminated. The tracks gleam with detail, often assembled from as many as 100 separate tracks, all of which were written and played solely by Ashlyn – a feat of world-building as daunting as it is devastating.

Melodies pirouette and crescendo in dazzling, elevated acrobatics, somewhere between Kate Bush and The Sundays, threaded with ethereal undercurrents of shimmering shadow. Riffs brood and sparkle over crystalline synths, buoyant bass, and patient percussion, steadily building to holy moments of tidal power, finessed to perfection by producer Chris Coady (Beach House, Slowdive, Zola Jesus). Ashlyn’s is a dream-pop of questing catharsis, vulnerable but orchestral, as dense with hooks as heartbreak.

The album’s title refers to Ashlyn’s recurring sensation of being trapped in the crest of a wave, turned and churned in the surf, mirroring the cycles of self-flagellation and surrender that she battles being bipolar. But as the poetic raptures of these songs attest, her creative process thrives at transmuting trauma into potent music of arresting beauty and hidden divinity. 

Ever Crashing sees its release August 19 via Dais Records on vinyl and across all digital platforms, pre-order or pre-save here. SRSQ just wrapped her EU/UK tour with RIKI and plans to tour North America later in the year.

Photo Courtesy: Leigh Violet