Daughter of Swords Shares New Single 'Money Hits' From New Album 'Alex'

Daughter of Swords shares “Money Hits,” a deceptively jaunty new single that explores the horrors of late-stage capitalism. Of the track the North Carolina singer-songwriter Alex Sauser-Monnig (they/she) who has previously released music with bands Mountain Man and The A’s, says “‘Money Hits’ is a song about financial striving, the fact that capitalism is a joke and everyone at the bottom is living its appalling punchline, but that nature will have the last laugh on all of us. Money is imaginary—a deadly and expensive roadblock at every turn for the poor, but so abundant as to almost become air for the affluent (‘floating, flying, shimmering, diving like a bird on the wing’). It’s also so imaginary that as the consequences of our inability to get off fossil fuels passes tipping points, no one will be able to buy their way back to a livable world (‘running through the woods while the water rises…’).”

There’s a sharp cerebral tension between the stories at the core of the album and the electrifying, playful buoyancy of the sound, the wink with which Sauser-Monnig can deliver a withering observation. Reckoning with pleasure-seeking, boundary-breaking, and their place in the world, Alex, out April 11th via Psychic Hotline, heralds a fresh chapter of exploration and liberation for Sauser-Monnig, yielding the truest representation of their identity via song yet. 

Recorded at Betty’s, Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill 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). 

Since releasing her debut album, Dawnbreaker, 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, and the cascading paradigm shifts it seems we're all hurtling toward.

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 their habitual 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 exploring in uncharted territory. Their priority became maximizing the mood of each track, borne out in Alex’s layers of synthetic textures and unorthodox flourishes.

Photo Credit: Graham Tolbert