Oropendola Releases New Single Ahead of Album Release on Friday

Brooklyn artist Oropendola (who has played with Half Waif, Barrie, Samir Langus) has released her new single Rorschach Sky. This is the third & final single (following Knocking Down Flowers and Trust the Sun ) off of her upcoming album "Waiting for the Sky to Speak" out this Friday, March 17th via Spirit House Records and Wilbur & Moore Records.

"I paused Twin Peaks to watch the kitchen clock," said Joanna when thinking back on writing Rorschach Sky."It was moving backwards. A slow, disorienting, luxuriously surreal countdown. April 7th, 2020, which I only knew because I grabbed my phone to type a bunch of exclamation points in my notepad.

I had barely changed out of my pajamas for three weeks. I was happy for Time: being able to veer off course. Stretch like silly putty until becoming shimmery and translucent, changing color and sequence like a kaleidoscope. Shifting identity like the clouds.

"Rorschach Sky" points to the missed opportunity of spending your life waiting for something when life is happening all around you. If you're waiting for some kind of answer from the sky, you're not seeing the beauty and the motion in every passing moment.

Do you see glimpses into other worlds, too? What do they look like? Do you feel the incessant gnawing, the weight of the waiting, the flicker of freedom? Do you start to wonder, do you start to dream: Are we finally off the hook?"

There's a confidence that rings out across the eleven songs that make up Waiting for the Sky to Speak, Joanna Schubert's debut album as Oropendola (a bird whose name translates to "golden pendulum"). These tracks shimmer with bursts of energy and emotion, swinging from playfulness to earnestness with deft, technicolor brushstrokes. The album is a celebration of choosing life even in the face of its ephemerality, and of finding motion even in the midst of stillness.

The songs on Waiting for the Sky to Speak were born from a time of immobility both existential and literal. As the world went into a state of lockdown during the pandemic, Schubert was reckoning with a feeling that, for years, her life had been at a standstill. She was ready to move forward, to embrace joy and sing through the static.

The album title, which comes from the album's opening track "Rorschach Sky," is a fitting one then: the phrase points to the missed opportunity of spending your life waiting for something when life is happening all around you.

Across this collection, Schubert's skill with orchestration and arrangement is on full display. The album's sonic palette blends the orchestral sounds of clarinet, flugelhorn, harp, and strings with searing synths, grooving drums and bass, adventurous vocal manipulations, and emotive piano. The result is a kind of kaleidoscopic chamber pop that pays homage to both the grandiose theatricality of Kate Bush and the digital balladry of FKA Twigs.

The production is bolstered by the textural flair of co-producer Zubin Hensler, who also served as mixer. Despite having never met before working together, the two podded up during the height of the pandemic at Hensler's studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and took their time recording between 2020 and 2021. The liminal space created by a world on pause led the two to develop an album that sounds limitless.

On lead single "Knocking Down Flowers," Schubert finds life in the least likely of places: a construction site. Here, she recognizes and illuminates the power of living at the intersection of contrasts. The album's emotional core comes through on roiling ballad "Trust the Sun" and clear-eyed album closer "When You Carried Me," which both look to the sun-another kind of golden pendulum-as a guiding force.

While much of the rest of Waiting for the Sky to Speak careens across black-ice patches of inner conflict, both these songs offer a tentative hand outward, towards love, friendship, and family- the fixed sun in a changeable sky-as she coaxes herself back out into the world.

Waiting for the Sky to Speak is an imaginative and colorful chimera of a collection that marks Oropendola's triumphant arrival. Ultimately, these songs ask one of the soul's most fundamental questions: how do you find your footing in an impermanent world? There is no absolute answer, and thus, as Schubert finds, there is no purpose in waiting for one. How liberating it is to break out of our own cycles, to be the force that knocks the pendulum off its axis.

Watch the new music video here:

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