The harpist and singer-songwriter Rebecca Kitba Bryson El-Saleh will release their self-titled debut as Kitba at the end of this week. All the advance singles (“My Words Don’t Work,” “Tied To Strings,” and “Peel Away The Rind“) have been great. So is “This Body,” our final preview of the record. The track is a trembling slow burn that matches El-Saleh’s gentle, searching, sorta-Björk-ish vocal with some splendid trumpet.

A statement from Kitba:

I began questioning my gender while making this record. Zubin and I would pull apart the meaning of these songs as we worked on them, and one day I walked out of his studio and onto the street and a thought appeared – what if I didn’t think of myself as a woman? What did that space allow? How did it feel in my body to remove that parameter? I had written “This Body” initially with the soft-meaning of a physical body’s shape (and as someone who has struggled with an ED for decades), but it occurred to me that I could have been creating space in my mind to challenge what I perceived as “fixed” gender. As I began letting go of the idea of myself as a “woman,” I felt a lightness come over my body. I felt freer to simply exist as myself. Things that had always confused me began to make sense. I am still in a process of discovery, but this song and the experience of making the record has allowed me to earnestly begin my gender journey. I am indebted to it and to Zubin, who created the space in the studio to explore the recesses of my mind.

Listen below.

Kitba is out 7/21 on Ruination.