Naomi Alligator's new album will be released on July 1.
Naomi Alligator, the musical alter ego of Los Angeles-based songwriter and multi-media artist Corrinne James, has released a self-directed and animated video for "Don't Get It," the latest from her upcoming new album, Double Knot, out July 1st on Carpark Records. Under The Radar, who premiered the video today is saying "quote."
Of the song and video James says "'Don't Get It' is a song about a bad friend. The music video takes that to the extreme and ends with a fight scene. I've never gotten into a fist fight (and don't plan on it) but I wanted to scratch the itch. I also wanted to film/edit a fight scene."
Naomi Alligator's home-spun recordings serve as a platform for James' lyrical narratives. Both mournful and aspirant, Double Knot wrestles with monolithic themes such as loneliness and yearning with an uncommon earnestness.
Naomi Alligator has also announced 2 hometown record release shows in Los Angeles, CA at Heavy Manners Library in July with Emily Yacina, Cryogeyser, Castle Pasture and Glenrock.
Naomi Alligator grew up on a river. The river was too polluted to swim in so instead of swimming, she spent much of her youth sitting beside it. She would read there, get drunk there, kiss her crushes there, etc... Her parents were antique dealers who filled the house with objects that had been living for thousands of years. The plants from the river would break through the windows and grow onto the antiques.
Naomi Alligator is the musical project created by Corrinne James. Corrinne created the project while she was sophomore at The University of Virginia. Tired of the obsession to make her visual art "perfect," she found catharsis in writing songs. She bought a four-track with an art grant she received from UVa and took it to an art residency hosted at Mountain Lake Biological Station in the Appalachian Mountains.
Corrinne, struggling with obsessive feelings of guilt while at this residency, wrote songs in effort to appease the thoughts. She created a collection of songs titled, Naomi and The Dagger. After the residency ended, she returned to her house in Virginia. The air conditioner in her room did not work, so long summer nights felt somewhat psychedelic. They felt especially psychedelic when the ivy outside would enter her house by breaking through the windowpane, creating a bridge that connected the outdoor ants to her ceiling.
Living in Virginia was both magnificent and depressing for those reasons. Corrinne continued to make music there (and Philly for eight months) until she decided to move to Los Angeles in June 2021. Outrunning her OCD, she's been able to focus on animating and appreciating a new place. She wants her music to feel both personal and vast, like you are sitting with your best friend while looking up at a bunch of trees. Her music consists of warm guitar strums, raw harmonies, and airy bells in effort to take you to that place. Her visual art practice, hand-drawn transformative animations and satirical videos, is actively informed by her music.
The world in which Corrinne/Naomi is creating is continually forming. It's made of myth, heroes, villains, forests, sound and drawings. She is excited to keep making work, and especially excited to share her album, Double Knot.
Naomi Alligator is fed up. She's sick of trying to make relationships work that have already run their course, and tired of sitting in a wintry apartment waiting for her life to kick into gear. On her forthcoming album Double Knot via Carpark Records, the modern folk singer/songwriter from Virginia attempts to unwind her life from all that is holding her back. In a way, it's a coming-of-age record about shedding what no longer serves you and, ultimately, finding something like deliverance.
Naomi Alligator began writing Double Knot while living in Philadelphia during the height of the pandemic and the deterioration of a longterm romance.When asked though, Naomi rejects the notion that Double Knot is a breakup album, or autobiographical at all. Moreso, she says, it's a personal reckoning in which, "the minute before you make a big decision, you tally up the reasons why you don't want to do what you're doing anymore."
That desire to turn the page expands to the production of the album as well. Naomi Alligator generally houses her narratives in beds of minimal, home-tracked instrumentation-influenced by the stripped-down poeticism of Joan Baez and Liz Phair's Girly-Sound tapes. Double Knot finds Naomi continuing to hone the winning combination of guitar and banjo she established on 2021's Concession Stand Girl EP.
For Double Knot though, Naomi wanted a fuller, more dynamic sound: more instruments, more harmonies, more layering, more, more, more. Inspired by the impressionistic melodies of Animal Collective and MGMT, Naomi peppers in computer-generated synths throughout the album, most notably on the song "Burn Out." These electronic flourishes augment the more grounding string instruments, arriving somewhere more ethereal than Naomi's earlier work while still maintaining her warm songwriting.
If anything, Double Knot is a reminder that you can always pack up your bags, try something new, and change your life. As for Naomi Alligator herself? She moved west, to California.
Watch the new music video here:
7/8 - Los Angeles, CA @ Heavy Manners Library * - TICKETS
7/9 - Los Angeles, CA @ Heavy Manner Library ^ - TICKETS
* Record Release Show w/ w/ Castle Pasture & Emily Yacina
^ Record Release Show w/ Glenrock & Cryogeyser
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