On their newest album ‘The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive,’ Alynda Segarra integrates their many musical selves into an excellent singer-songwriter document.
It’s been a decade of reinvention for Hurray for the Riff Raff, the recording moniker of singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra. After years of street-busking and self-releasing acoustic information, Segarra cemented their standing as an old-timey roots standard-bearer on 2014 Small City Heroes. However over the course of their previous two albums–2017’s The Navigator and 2021’s Life On Earth–Segarra chipped away at that creative id by exploring different musical lineages (all the things from alt-pop to punk to Nuyorican folk-poetry) whereas carving out a more true creative self. Their new album, The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive, represents a closing of the loop for Segarra, a connecting and reconciling of all their musical selves and histories.
The album is the second collaboration between Segarra and producer Brad Prepare dinner, who brings the identical earthy groundedness to Segarra’s music as he does to Waxahatchee information like St. Cloud. But when Life On Earth nonetheless felt intent on defining itself partly by what it was not, The Previous is Nonetheless Alive achieves one thing even braver: Segarra has honed their craft right into a cohesive, astonishingly realized singer-songwriter document.
The Previous is Nonetheless Alive is essentially the most song-forward document in Segarra’s physique of labor, a mixture of folky ballads, surging anthems, and mellow-country rockers; there’s even a waltz-time duet with Conor Oberst and, elsewhere, lonesome pedal metal by way of Oberst’s Brilliant Eyes bandmate Mike Mogis. The unobstructive manufacturing is an ideal match for a document that options the very best batch of songs Segarra’s ever written: tales of grief and mourning (“Alibi”), youthful romance and misadventure (“Ogallala”), returning and rebirth (“Vetiver”).
On the middle of all of it is “Snakeplant (The Previous Is Nonetheless Alive),” a surprising epic that Segarra has described as their model of Bob Dylan’s “I Was Younger Once I Left Residence” (Segarra quotes it within the music). Over 4 minutes, what begins as a collection of impressionistic previous recollections transforms into a robust anthem of perseverance and compassion within the age of opioid overdoses and capitalist violence: “Check your medicine/Bear in mind Narcan,” they sing. “There’s a battle on the folks/What don’t you perceive?”
Segarra sings fairly a bit about their vagabond practice hopping days all through the album. It’s only one little bit of their previous that, because the album title suggests, has enabled Segarra to make a document they’ve been writing, in a method or one other, for the previous fifteen years. As Segarra places it on “Ogallala”: “I used to assume I used to be born within the flawed technology/However now I do know I made it proper on time.”
