PHOTO: © Rosanna Graf

Sophia Kennedy

In the organizer's words:

Squeeze Me - Tour

Squeeze Me - a slogan from the colorful world of toy departments: So it comes across as a sweet enticement in the warm department store lights, but there could be something else behind the charming invitation of the lifeless plush and plastic paws.

On Squeeze Me, the third album by Baltimore-born Sophia Kennedy , who lives in Hamburg and Berlin, which has been announced for March, the supposedly harmless is turned into the opposite: Are you hugging me or crushing me? This is the central question that Kennedy pursues with sublime determination over ten songs.

After her self-titled debut (2017, Pampa Records), which oscillated between the glamor of the Great American Songbook, electronics and club influences and attracted international attention, her second album Monsters(City Slang) followed in 2021, which plunged into surrealism and transcendence.

Now, Kennedy and her longtime musical collaborator and co-writer Mense Reents(Egoexpress, die Vögel, Die Goldenen Zitronen) offer a more disillusioned commentary on the status quo on Squeeze Me . The complexity of interpersonal relationships, questions about positions of power and self-determination, already central motifs in Kennedy's work, run through the album as a compact narrative.

More minimalist than her previous works, Kennedy indulges her talent for catchy melodies with pop appeal and psychedelic excesses on Squeeze Me: repetitive piano chords, shimmering synthesizer basses, strangely shimmering choirs and a scream, for example, form the soundscape for Rodeo. Alongside Imaginary Friend, one of the pop highlights of the album, it poses the urgent question: "Where are we heading to?". But instead of giving answers, Kennedy moves forward with relish and polyphony.

The songwriting on Squeeze Me is characterized by its simplicity and a new penchant for reduction. On Imaginary Friend, Kennedy tears herself away from a stale, supposed dream state with irresistible catchiness and nonchalance to an organ and drum computer beat - whereas on Runner, which lures us onto a dark dancefloor, she briefly transforms into a fly.

A cinematic quality runs through the entire album - no wonder, as Kennedy once studied film. At the end, for example, she picks up speed again on the spiky Hot Match and speeds away with a motorik beat and hot tires through rising clouds of smoke.

Toughness and beauty, wit and melancholy, fatalism and strength: Squeeze Me turns everything we thought we knew about Sophia Kennedy on its head, in keeping with the motto of the cover, on which she or the rest of the world is upside down, depending on your perspective. More focused and "poppier" than ever, Squeeze Me is Sophia Kennedy's most stringent album, perhaps even something of an artistic manifesto. It is a multi-layered, self-confident statement, despite or perhaps because of all the crises within and without. Squeeze Me doesn't ignore the world out there, but confronts it with its own, a world that we somehow know, but perhaps have never seen before.

Squeeze Me - a slogan from the colorful world of toy departments: So it comes across as a sweet enticement in the warm department store light, but there could be something else behind the charming appeal of the lifeless plush and plastic paws.

On Squeeze Me, the third album by Baltimore-born Sophia Kennedy , who lives in Hamburg and Berlin, which has been announced for March, the supposedly harmless is turned into the opposite: Are you hugging me or crushing me? This is the central question that Kennedy pursues with sublime determination over ten songs.

After her self-titled debut (2017, Pampa Records), which oscillated between the glamor of the Great American Songbook, electronics and club influences and attracted international attention, her second album Monsters(City Slang) followed in 2021, which plunged into surrealism and transcendence.

Now, Kennedy and her longtime musical collaborator and co-writer Mense Reents(Egoexpress, die Vögel, Die Goldenen Zitronen) offer a more disillusioned commentary on the status quo on Squeeze Me . The complexity of interpersonal relationships, questions about positions of power and self-determination, already central motifs in Kennedy's work, run through the album as a compact narrative.

More minimalist than her previous works, Kennedy indulges her talent for catchy melodies with pop appeal and psychedelic excesses on Squeeze Me: repetitive piano chords, shimmering synthesizer basses, strangely shimmering choirs and a scream, for example, form the soundscape for Rodeo. Alongside Imaginary Friend, one of the pop highlights of the album, it poses the urgent question: "Where are we heading to?". But instead of giving answers, Kennedy moves forward with relish and polyphony.

The songwriting on Squeeze Me is characterized by its simplicity and a new penchant for reduction. On Imaginary Friend, Kennedy tears herself away from a stale, supposed dream state with irresistible catchiness and nonchalance to an organ and drum computer beat - whereas on Runner, which lures us onto a dark dancefloor, she briefly transforms into a fly.

A cinematic quality runs through the entire album - no wonder, as Kennedy once studied film. At the end, for example, she picks up speed again on the spiky Hot Match and speeds away with a motorik beat and hot tires through rising clouds of smoke.

Toughness and beauty, wit and melancholy, fatalism and strength: Squeeze Me turns everything we thought we knew about Sophia Kennedy on its head, in keeping with the motto of the cover, on which she or the rest of the world is upside down, depending on your perspective. More focused and "poppier" than ever, Squeeze Me is Sophia Kennedy's most stringent album, perhaps even something of an artistic manifesto. It is a multi-layered, self-confident statement, despite or perhaps because of all the crises within and without. Squeeze Me doesn't ignore the world out there, but confronts it with its own, a world that we somehow know, but perhaps have never seen before.

This content has been machine translated.
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Location

KNUST Hamburg Neuer Kamp 30 20357 Hamburg

Organizer

Konzertdirektion Palme GmbH
Konzertdirektion Palme GmbH Stresemannstraße 86 22769 Hamburg

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