Dawn Richard has announced a new album for Merge Records. Pigments, the follow-up to last year’s Second Line, will arrive Oct. 21. It’s an album she recorded in collaboration with Massachusetts multi-instrumentalist Spencer Zahn.
For Pigments, Richard wrote and recorded 11 songs, many in collaboration with musicians Zahn, Stuart Bogie, Mike Haldeman, Malcolm Parson, and Dave Scalia, among others. The sessions pushed her toward mature musicality, exploring a contemporary classical and jazz sound rather than a fusion of R&B and electronic heard in previous works.
“I felt like the tools that I and other people like me were dealt weren’t shiny. Yet we still painted these beautiful pictures. This album is what it means to be a dreamer and finally reach a place where you’ve decided to love the pigments that you have,” explains Richard.
Pigments is designed to be a reflective work that she hopes can lead fans to look inward and see themselves. “The point is that we’re going through the same thing in different way. No matter what walks of life we come from, the story can be similar,” she adds.
The album also will celebrate her father Frank Richard who received a master’s degree in classical music theory. He’s also the lead singer of the funk band Chocolate Milk.
“Pigments is a project about the power of self-expression through living art, through motion. It’s also a love letter to New Orleans, Louisiana,” says Frank Richard.
In conjunction with the album announcement, Richard and Zahn share the first four songs from Pigments. The package of songs, deemed Movement 1, comprises “Coral,” “Sandstone,” “Indigo,” and “Vantablack.” Richard directed the music video for the latter track, marking her directorial debut.
Richard and Zahn previously collaborated on “Cyanotype,” lifted from his 2018 debut album People of the Dawn.
As mentioned above, Richard last released Second Line in April 2022. Her first Merge Records outing included “Mornin | Streetlights” and “Jacuzzi,” to name a few songs.
In a 2021 interview with Rated R&B, Richard shared what she hoped fans received after consuming Second Line. “I want them to have a cathartic experience. I want them to levitate. I want them to feel hope. I want them to feel like this is a calling, especially to people who have ever felt like they didn’t have lanes, spots, spaces,” she said.
Listen to Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn’s four new offerings below.
