Music Crush Monday: Santigold

Santigold has released her first album in six years, in what can only be described as how to reinvent the type of music people search for to comfort them.

 Spirituals is the follow-up to her 2016 99¢ album. Spirituals arrived on September 9 via Santigold’s own label Little Jerk. Spirituals was recorded largely during the 2020 lockdown. “All of a sudden there I was with three small children out of school—just-turned-2-year-old twins and a 6-year-old—I was cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and changing diapers from morning to night, with three little kids coming in and out of my bed throughout each night like musical chairs,” Santigold said in press materials. “I was losing touch with the artist me, stuck in a part of myself that was too small. I felt the other parts of me were shrinking, disappearing.”

Santigold concocts her own version of African-American gospel music. Spirituals is aptly titled as the album uses a mix of modern sounds of celestial pop, punk-rap, funk, electronica-reggae, and a smidge of hyperpop, she reimagines the type of music that can comfort people in times of grief and stagnation. It’s an experiment with transcendence as a vehicle for catharsis that, at times, gets muddled with attempts to ground its political commentary within the music. For this Music Crush Monday we went with “High Priestess” a single off of her new album.