A couple weeks ago, René Kladzyk announced a new album as Ziemba, Unsubtle Magic, with the lead single “Fear.” The album is already just about here, set to arrive next week, and today Kladzyk returns with two new songs that appear on the album, both radically reinterpreted covers. The first, “Set In Ice,” is her version of a track that Kladzyk’s father wrote in 1974 under the name Aurel Roy. In a statement, Kladzyk went into her father’s history with making music:

He [my father] wrote hundreds of songs during his 12-year music career, but when my mom got pregnant he quit music entirely and got a 9 to 5 job at an automobile manufacturing factory in rural Michigan. Growing up, he seldom talked about that chapter of his life — as a kid I was always curious about it and would try to pry stories out of him. He mostly would just say he didn’t remember, or that it felt like another life. But when I started working as a touring musician he was so proud of me, something I think is a rarity for parents of broke musicians. He would comment on how difficult what I was doing was, and started to share more stories from that time in his life with me. Beyond being his kid, we formed a new bond around our shared trials as working musicians. He was a trusted (and sometimes brutal) advisor and a constant cheerleader. After he died, his songs and lyric notebooks became an important gateway for me to continue expanding my relationship with him. His version of “Set in Ice” was an unadorned piano ballad, but I reimagined it as a driving song, picturing him at the wheel on long solo road trips. It has an endless quality to it that I identify with: “get up every morning just to sing these songs.” Covering his songs feels like a form of magic, a way to bring him back for just a moment, or to catch a glimpse of a version of him I never knew in this life.

The other cover she’s sharing is a song you know (and probably love): “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” which Kladzyk said was “inspired by Cristina’s ZE records releases and the saccharine assault on the senses of a stocking full of candy.” Check out both below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Gushing Water”
02 “Only Lonely Christmas”
03 “Will You Haunt Me”
04 “Fear”
05 “Set In Ice”
06 “A Nightmare”
07 “Sandia Crest”
08 “Time Doesn’t Freeze”
09 “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”
10 “Unsubtle Magic”

Unsubtle Magic is out 12/10 via Sister Polygon Records. Pre-order it here.