Fire-Toolz is Angel Marcloid, a Chicago artist whose inventive and overwhelming electronic tracks smash past any and all genre conventions on their way to flooding your senses. Her new album Lavender Networks drops next month, and the catchily titled lead single "Balam =^..^= Says IPv09082024 Strawberry Head" was our favorite song of the week a few weeks back. Now, she's got another one.
Lavender Networks has guest appearances from artists like Zola Jesus, and her latest track has vocals from Nashville session musician Jennifer Holm. The song is called "And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home." It combines Holm's soothing, optimistic melody with the layers of bubbly electronics and death-metal growls that characterize Fire-Toolz' music.
In a press release, Fire-Toolz says that the song is about "moving out of my old place, where I lived alone in another town. The grief, the way the sunsets looked against the houses, everything about the song makes me feel like I'm walking through the neighborhood on a warm autumn day, with no one to answer to, just being. Being afraid, being cozy." She also tells a fun story about finding Holm after hearing her voice in the background of a YouTube video:
One evening I was watching a goofy YouTube video by this creator named Eddy Burback. At the end of the video he inserted a royalty free stock song that was kind of a sad ballad, to try and create a mood for a sequence in the video.
I was sooooo overtaken by it for some reason, despite it being used as simple low-key melancholy montage music. Strumming an acoustic guitar and singing some sad words. But it gripped me in an intense way. It resonated with me immediately. I knew whoever was playing & singing it was someone special.
I got kinda weird and scoured the internet for the artist, because in my experience most royalty free stock music is faceless. I eventually found her, though. A session singer, church mommy and Nashville lady with a few solo albums from the 2010s. I listened to them over and over and over and over. Just....post-country, inoffensive, low key, singer songwriter stuff. But I was obsessed with her songs for some reason.I found her, reached out, asked her how much she'd charge to sing lead on one of my songs. She was all about it right off the bat. I wrote the lyrics, and what you hear is what she sent back on her first try. It's one of my favorite songs I've ever made.
I don't know if Jennifer knows what she got herself into!!!
In the CESTAINSI-directed video for "And Where Is The Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home," a car drives around a faceless subdivision while CGI cartoon avatars for inanimate objects bounce around on the dashboard. Check it out below.
Lavender Networks is out 5/8 on Warp.
