Absence sounds like cacophony on Lavender. Nandi Rose Plunkett wrote her third album in the wake of her grandmother’s death. That loss, compacted with a rigorous touring schedule which made it feel like there was no real place she could call home, influences the wandering and foreboding atmosphere that inhabits Lavender. Plunkett utilizes snapping beats and dramatic piano flourishes to ground her celestial pop songs. All of the anger and frustration that simmers beneath the surface makes these songs sound claustrophobic, but also endlessly beautiful and cathartic.
This album is so lyrically compelling and touching in so many ways. The careful composition of each song is beautifully crated. Every track is unique ‘Lavender’ really displays Half Waif’s musical talent. This album is also such a treat to see performed live. Nandi Rose Plunkett is an extremely expressive and fun performer it makes you see the songs in a whole new light.
Brooklyn-based synth-pop trio Half Waif released their Cascine Records debut album Lavender in April. It’s about love, legacy and the inevitable decline of human existence. The album’s closer “Ocean Scope” ties up loose ends after 11 songs filled with talk of endings.
The band has released a lavender-tinted music video for the song with a dawn-to-dusk transformation of lead singer Nandi Rose Plunkett. “The video starts and ends on a salt marsh, where the land meets the ocean,” Plunkett said of the video in a statement. “What happens in the night in between is a spiritual reverie, a walk through the ego and revisiting of past selves.”
To match this transformation, we see Plunkett wade into the water before transitioning to a run through the forest with war paint-like makeup. The purples hues intensify as the video soldiers on until Plunkett has a startling awakening back on the marsh in the pastel hue of the early morning.
Brooklyn songwriter Nandi Rose Plunkett leads the exquisite folk-pop trio Half Waif, whose new album, Lavender, arrives April 27th. Watch them perform the lovely album opener “Lavender Burning,”
Nandi Rose Plunkett is a seeker. As frontwoman of synth-pop outfit Half Waif, Plunkett writes songs that travel profoundly inward over beds of electronic instrumentation that expand and recede like ocean tides. But there is a darkness that cuts through Half Waif’s songs, hinting at a searching that is often born of loss and struggle. Lavender, the group’s latest album, centers on questions of loneliness and isolation, of the consequences of hard-fought wisdom and self-knowledge.
Half Waif has spent months on the road leading up to the album’s recording, and it shows; many of Lavender’s songs have a narrator who feels adrift, reaching towards an unattainable sense of home. “You used to say / ‘When are you coming back?’ / Then came the day / When you no longer asked,” Plunkett mourns on “Torches.” In an essay about her single “Back In Brooklyn,” a stunning piano ballad from the album, Plunkett describes how returning from tour left her feeling isolated and aching: “I was unmoored and questioning everything — not least of all my decision to forgo the stability and community I had cultivated in New York for something more ephemeral … There is a loneliness about this life that is hard to describe.”
“Back In Brooklyn” is the most unadorned of Lavender’s songs: just Plunkett’s voice and the piano (and a brief sample of a New York subway horn). It’s perhaps the only place on the record where Plunkett’s voice breaks from its classically-trained veneer: For all the impressive clarity and range she demonstrates across the record, there is something nearly heart-stopping about the way her voice cracks as she begs her listener to “listen for me now.” Her formal training shines through, too, in the careful stacks of electronic arrangements in these songs and her layers of vocal harmonies. Bandmates Adan Carlo (bass and guitar) and Zack Levine (live drums) add touches that ground and structure the songs, providing a stable base for Plunkett’s waves of synths and keyboards.
Lavender is, in many ways, an album about isolation, but its inverse threads its way into many songs; themes of connection — specifically, matrilineal connection — appear across the album. The album is named in honor of Plunkett’s grandmother, who had a habit of picking lavender from her garden to boil on the stove — a ritual of beauty, but also one of purification, Plunkett believes. On “Salt Candy,” Plunkett addresses her beloved maternal figures directly: “I was once a thousand other things now I’m not / I don’t understand why / Mother do you recognize your daughter? / Little head so full of big ideas.” There’s an ache to the song, which — like many on the album — pulls gently on the tangled threads of growth, dependency, the self and family, earnestly seeking an answer yet fearful of triggering a total unraveling. But across its 12 tracks, Lavender shows Plunkett coming to terms with the reality that pain is often an important intermediary to wisdom, that a little unraveling can help let the light in.
Half Waif – “Lavender Burning” Recorded Live: 4/16/2018 – Paste Studios – New York, NY
Lavender comes out April 27th through Cascine Records.
‘Back In Brooklyn’ is the third single from Lavender, the new album from Half Waif, out on Cascine Records. Following 2017’s form/a EP and reissue of her 2016 album Probable Depths, Half Waif returns with a new record, Lavender. The album is Half Waif’s most fully realized work to date: a stunning collection of innovative and evocative electronic pop. Limited edition LPs include a special photobook, featuring exclusive photographs and tear-out prints.
Nandi Rose Plunkett writes, records and performs under the name Half Waif. Nandi was the daughter of an Indian refugee mother and an American father of Irish/Swiss descent. Growing up she listened to everything from Joni Mitchell and Tori Amos, to Celtic songstress Loreena McKennitt and traditional Indian bhajans. Her output as Half Waif reflects these varying influences, resulting in a richly layered collage of blinking electronic soundscapes, echoes of Celtic melodies and the elegiac chord changes of 19th-century art music. This year, Half Waif has released her latest record Lavender, so named for Nandi’s grandmother Asha – a nod to the lavender she would pluck from her garden and boil in a pot on the stove.
Half Waif, the Brooklyn-based synth-pop trio made up of Nandi Rose Plunkett, Adan Carlo and Zack Levine, will release their Cascine Records debut on April 27th. The album is called Lavender and another track “Torches,” is an evocative and elemental balancing act between freedom and comfort.
“I know somewhere to my left is an undying coast / I think of it in the night when I know I need it most,” Plunkett sings, taking solace in the distant presence of vast and calming waters while she traverses a world of fire and blood. “I see the way the landscape burns / Upturned by the violence / Are these torches meant to fill the unending silence?” she wonders, her delicate voice complemented by a skittering beat and pulsing synths.
Plunkett says of the song: “Torches” opens with the terror of a world that burns, tempered by the cool reminder of an undying coast somewhere nearby. It then imagines what happens when that lit darkness reaches you before you can reach the water’s edge—when you come to feed off it, called by the scream of the open, endless road. It’s probably not surprising that I wrote this song in the days immediately after Trump’s election, driving through Texas on a stretch of highway.
Lavender was unveiled a month ago today, along with lead single “Keep It Out,” the track is a “spectral and beautiful” exploration of “isolation and longing” with “an elegant and minimal beat.” In other words, Plunkett and company are two for two. Half Waif recently expanded their spring tour, adding co-headlining dates with Hovvdy and support dates with Mitski, both wonderful combos.
Massachusetts-born Irish/Swiss singer-songwriter Nandi Rose Plunkett aka Half Waif will be releasing her new album Lavender on April 27th. ‘Keep it Out’ is about “the evolution of the self in a relationship: the maintenance of autonomy in the midst of a process of coupling, ageing, and decay.” –
The video was directed by Celina Carney and choreographed by 2nd Best Dance Company. She supports Iron & Wine on tour soon.
‘Keep It Out’ is the first single from Lavender, the new album from Half Waif
Nandi Rose Plunket teased the name of her second long-player as Half Waif back in June. “[The title] is the talisman we hold to heal ourselves and ward the night away,” she explained. Lavender – which follows the EP form/a on Cascine – was recorded over five months after moving to upstate New York: “I am exactly where I’m meant to be… it feels like an album I couldn’t have written before I was this age, and I wouldn’t have made the move up here before I was this age, so it’s a natural harmony of timing and need.”
She describes it as “elegy to time, the pilgrimages we take, and the ultimate slow plod towards aging. It takes place at dusk; its spirit animal is the heron, which I occasionally spied at the pond behind our summer house as the album gained shape. It’s an examination of the way we fracture over time, inside ourselves and inside our relationships – the fissures that creep along the structures we build, the tendency towards disintegration.”
The Fat Angel Sings 