Kennedy Ashlyn aka Srsq [pronounced ‘seer-skew’] is thrilled to announce she’ll be touring for the first time in nearly 3 years to support her latest acclaimed album, Ever Crashing. After a performance at this year’s Levitation festival in Austin, Srsq takes off up the East Coast supporting Ceremony in Atlanta, Nashville, Philadelphia, NYC and more. December 2 she joins Choir Boy down the West Coast, performing in Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco and more. Check out a full list of dates below, to purchase tickets go here.

Ever Crashing is the summation of a nearly three-year journey of soul searching, songwriting, and self-discovery. 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.

Now she has shared a stunning self-directed video for her epic pop ballad, “Used To Love Me”. The video invites viewers to check-in after hours to the glamour-camp-fantasy world of the Lost Love Resort, at which SRSQ takes a one night residency. Kennedy explains,  “Cinematographer Leigh Violet and I drew on visual references from many artists, people, and real-life locations including David Lynch, John Waters, the Madonna Inn, Creepy Gals, Busby Berkeley, the Cramps, Jane Mansfield, and uncanny animatronics of yesteryear. The video cheekily plays at the fact that through it all, in this fantasy world as in real life, I will always have my music and my cats.”

Lyrically, the song is about “trying to rekindle a dying flame, and trying to understand how something that once shone so bright could wither away.”

Ever Crashing began materializing in the wake of an ADHD and bipolar disorder diagnosis, prompting a profound personal overhaul. Ashlyn cites such periods of turmoil as a muse of sorts, when “songs begin to echo within me,” gradually reverberating clearer and more vividly. As melodies and arrangements come into focus, the songs act like containers, vessels in which to externalize and exorcize tumultuous emotions.

“I became myself in the process of making this record.” From the first choral swells of opener “It Always Rains,” it’s clear this collection exists on an ascendent plane, capturing an artist in superbloom. From swooning end credits balladry (“Dead Loss”) to orchestral slow-burn torch songs (“Abyss”) to dizzying shoegaze heavens (“Someday I Will Bask In The Sun”), the album exudes a sense of aching grandeur and bewildered joy, rich with triumphs hard won and lost loves never forgotten. 

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 is an aching, rare work, shaded with gradients of reverie and regret, loss and letting go, “mourning the person I thought I should be, mourning the person I never was.” But even in its pain, Ashlyn’s voice exerts a redemptive gravity, yearning to transform and transcend: “Even on the inside / I’m bracing for impact / I’m waiting to destroy my life / To become sunlight.”

Listen / Share / Playlist / Purchase Ever Crashing Here

Srsq Live Dates:

10/30/22: Austin, TX – Levitation

11/02/22: Fort Worth, TX – Tulips *

11/04/22: Atlanta, GA – Underground Atlanta *

11/05/22: Nashville, TN – The Blue Room at Third Man Records *

11/07/22: Asheville, NC – The Grey Eagle Tavern & Music Hall *

11/08/22: Washington, DC – DC9 *

11/09/22: Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church *

11/10/22: Worcester, MA – The Palladium Upstairs *

11/11/22: Brooklyn, NY – The Meadows *

11/12/22: Lakewood, OH – Mahall’s *

12/02/22: Vancouver, BC – Wise Hall ~

12/03/22: Seattle, WA – The Crocodile ~

12/04/22: Portland, OR – Revolution Hall ~

12/06/22: Reno, NV – The Holland Project ~

12/08/22: San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall ~

12/09/22: San Jose, CA – The Ritz ~

12/10/22: Los Angeles, CA – The Belasco #

* with Ceremony 

~ with Choir Boy

# Dais Records 15 Year Anniversary w/ Drab Majesty, ADULT., Choir Boy & More

Photo Courtesy: Nedda Afsari