Brooklyn's Ok Cowgirl Announces Debut LP, Shares Electrifying 'Little Splinters'

Brooklyn's OK Cowgirl has announced the August 16 release of their debut LP, Couldn't Save Us From My Gut via Easy Does It Records and released the single and video of the electrifying album opener "Little Splinters.” The band will celebrate the release with a performance at Union Pool this Friday, May 24. 

Ok Cowgirl unleashes the subliminal to allow for dynamic, profound messiness to tear free – often making for the record’s most captivating moments like the lead single.

"'Little Splinters' is a song about self-empowerment and self-love," says singer/songwriter Leah Lavigne of the track. "It's named 'Little Splinters' because it’s about feeling small and insignificant, like a splinter — something so tiny that people don’t even notice you’re there except for when you are a nuisance to them."

“Sometimes vulnerability just looks like trash,” Lavigne rasps. “Shared it just to scare myself and then to have to let it go.”

Couldn't Save Us From My Gut was recorded and produced by Alex Farrar (MJ Lenderman, Indigo De Souza, Wednesday), and from fuzz-drenched power chords and soaring hooks to dreamy synths and intimate restraint, it tells stories of heartbreak, and personal growth, existential dread, and love. The title refers to the album’s through-line of holding tight to one’s intuition as life unfolds before you… “even all our love couldn’t save us from my gut.”

For songwriter Leah Lavigne, Ok Cowgirl began as a mantra. As a solo artist, she began to feel stuck – the keyboard on which she was classically trained had grown stale, and the songs she was writing on it only managed to capture a sliver of her emotional range. Writing and performing music had once been a life-changing force of connection – a way to find common ground as an Asian-American growing up in predominantly white environments and speak about her inner world and be heard. But after attending school and finding community in New York City, her expanded musical purview and deepened understanding of self-made for more energy than could fit within the fences of playing songs alone behind a piano. The land of the known wasn’t cutting it – she needed a frontier. So: Lavigne borrows a guitar, and Lavigne starts a rock band. So goes the command: giddy-up!

Since forming the project in 2018, Lavigne gradually culled the band (rounded out by lead guitarist Jake Sabinsky, guitar and synth player John Miller, bassist Ryan Work, and drummer Matt Birkenholz) from her Brooklyn surroundings – college dormmates, local bartenders, and the producer of the project’s inaugural releases all make appearances in the lineup. The confidence the band exudes is thrilling – the six years they’d spent preparing for their debut are on vivid display.

Much of Ok Cowgirl’s confidence is apparent in how Lavigne and her bandmates consistently bend each arrangement to serve the conversations at their center. “The holiest thing is a feeling,” says Lavigne, and the sanctity of the band’s approach is clear – each song takes the shape of a prism for her commune with herself.

Under Farrar’s guidance, Ok Cowgirl allowed themselves to stretch out across the vast territory afforded them as a collaborative unit, winning miles of new ground along the way: reverb is transformed from a crutch into a tool, and the aims of being simply beautiful are exchanged for harnessing the raw potency generated after a long tenure honing themselves as a live act.

“Sometimes I feel like I write the songs before I’m ready for them, almost,” she tells me. This reads as a good sign – Lavigne started Ok Cowgirl to make room for a stifled intuition, a sense of direction she often strayed from out of fear. Now that intuition is getting out ahead of her, leading her into worlds unknown. In cowgirl keeping, one could almost say she’s riding it into the sunset.

Couldn't Save Us From My Gut track listing:

1 - Little Splinters

2 - Forever

3 - Our Love

4 - Mars Cheese Castle

5 - Larry David

6 - On My Mind

7 - Swirling

8 - Diner Song

9 - Abbey

10 - Nighttime Thinking

Photo Credit: Rita Iovine

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