Olivia O Announces New Album & Shares “One Hit Wonder”
Today, Olivia O, one half of the NYC by way of Atlanta duo Lowertown, has announced her forthcoming sophomore album No Bones, Sickly Sweet due out November 1st. Lead single “One Hit Wonder” is a hypnotic dirge led by discordant guitarwork that reckons with her desire to be liked by her peers and fans, slipping down a black hole of self-loathing into speculation on what would happen if she were to one day blow up her whole career onstage.
“One Hit Wonder is a song of self-deprecation and “what if’s” and the schadenfreude instinct inside all of us,” Olivia shares “I wrote this song during a period of extreme disgust with myself as well as regret and compulsive obsession over choices i had made in the past.”
For 99% of artists, the music industry is a meat grinder, constantly whirring, forever hungry for something fresh to pulverize. At only 22, Olivia Osby knows this better than most; a semi-public figure online since she was 14 , breaking through with her band Lowertown at 18, Osby has been around the block enough times to have met her fair share of people who want to optimize her art and on-sell her dreams. It’s enough to break anyone – which makes it all the more remarkable that No Bones, Sickly Sweet, her self-released second album as Olivia O, is less a capitulation to the immense pressures that the industry places on its young female stars as much as an outright rejection of them. It embraces the things we’re taught to reject – pain, boredom, quiet – and uses them as fuel for an album that’s at turns raw, upsetting and profoundly beautiful.
Existing firmly in a canon of defiant outsider musicians that stretches from Linda Perhacs and Karen Dalton through to Alex G and Salvia Palth, No Bones, Sickly Sweet is a strident statement of Olivia’s resilience as well as a love letter to the rich, restorative power of DIY music. Almost entirely written, recorded, produced and mixed by Olivia – her Lowertown bandmate Avsha Weinberg contributes to a handful of tracks, and Sean Henry plays on one song – No Bones, Sickly Sweet is haunting and strange, uncomfortable and, ultimately, invigorating, for both listener and author.
Fresh off a nation tour with breakout slowcore act sign crushes motorist, Olivia O will embark on a run of East Coast dates supporting pioneering shoegaze group Drop Nineteens this October, kicking off in Brooklyn, and heading through Northampton, Montreal, Toronto, and concluding in Chicago.
Tour Dates:
10/19 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Made *
10/20 – Northampton, MA @ Iron Horse *
10/21 – Montreal, QC @ Bar Le Ritz *
10/22 – Toronto, ON @ Lee’s Palace *
10/23 – Chicago, IL @ Metro *
* supporting Drop Nineteens
