UPC: 850056058957 Daughter of Swords is the solo project of North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig (they/she), who has also released music with bands Mountain Man and The A's. Their solo debut, Dawnbreaker , was a hushed folk record released in 2019; in the years since, Sauser-Monnig found a new understanding of self, personally and musically. Across the last several years, Daughter of Swords' music has grown thornier, an unpredictable and knotty tangle of technicolor synths, heady guitar, bubbling rhythms, a sheen enveloping songs about raw human intensity writ large - crushes, desire, anger, alienation, the horrors of late-stage capitalism, the cascading paradigm shifts it seems we're all hurtling toward. Enter Alex, Daughter of Sword's sinewy new record. Recorded at Betty's (Sylvan Esso's studio), Alex was built out by Sauser-Monnig's longtime friends/collaborators Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man, The A's), Jenn Wasner (Wye Oak, Flock of Dimes), Nick Sanborn (Sylvan Esso, Made of Oak), TJ Maiani (Weyes Blood, Neneh Cherry), and Caleb Wright (Hippo Campus, Samia). There's a sharp cerebral tension between the stories at the core of these songs and theelectrifying, playful buoyancy of the sound, the wink with whichSauser-Monnig can deliver a withering observation. Reckoning with pleasure-seeking, boundary-breaking, and their place in the world, Alex heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet. A reassessment of inner systems, and relationships of all sorts -- with art and creativity, with other humans, with gender - happened in tandem with Sauser-Monnig's interrogation of the late-capitalist culture that makes life for working artists an inequitable grind. Forced out of theirhabitual ways of thinking and being, Sauser-Monnig found new energy in dissolving old limitations--be they about the music business or their concept of gender--and explorin...