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MOTHICA shares first single from upcoming album Kissing Death

Watch the video for MOTHICA’s new “melancholy ballad” Doomed, taken from her just-announced third album Kissing Death.

MOTHICA shares first single from upcoming album Kissing Death
Words:
Emily Carter
Photo:
Paige Strabala

MOTHICA has announced details of her new album, and shared its lead single.

Due out on August 23 via Heavy Heart/Rise Records, the full-length goes by the name Kissing Death, and is the follow-up to 2022’s Nocturnal.

Speaking about the concept behind Kissing Death and all its soon-to-be-released music videos, MOTHICA shares: “I decided to make death a love interest in a dark rom-com-style tale. Throughout the visuals, I’m seen in a therapist’s office explaining this complicated relationship as if describing a scorned lover. The music videos will be like ‘flashbacks’ of what I’m telling my therapist.

“On the first single, Doomed, we go back in time to an angsty teenage version of me. This is my first brush with the Grim Reaper and I doodle pictures of him in my diary surrounded by hearts. Flash forward, I’m shown performing at a dive bar, clubbing, engulfed in self-destruction. He stalks me, and eventually even proposes marriage, and I leave him at the altar and run away. It ends with me and death in couple’s therapy. I wanted the music to feel cinematic, like the soundtrack of a movie.”

More specifically revealing all about Doomed, she adds that musically it’s a “sibling of my song Forever Fifteen. It’s a melancholy ballad and has this shoegaze influence at the end of the song that swells up with intensity. I’ve heard people talk about gifted child syndrome, or about feeling like a disappointment compared to the accolades they were given as a young kid and I didn’t know other people felt the same way.

“I was a smart kid with a bright future, and sometimes I feel like my depression sabotaged some of that light I had. In the second verse, I open up about my experience in my church youth group and my abusive youth pastor. When I was just coming out of middle school, I was awkward and insecure and I hoped church would be a safe place to make friends but I was taking advantage of at my most vulnerable. I wish I could go back and protect myself from some of the things I went through, and it was incredibly therapeutic to recreate my teenage bedroom for the music video. I casted my friend to play a younger version of me, adorned in 2009 emo warped tour era posters, and show this angsty misunderstood girl. I am terrified to put this song out but I showed the ending to my therapist and she teared up so I felt like this was an important song to lead the album with. It feels like a small sliver of my origin story.”

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