Tenderness - True [LP]

Tenderness - the solo project of Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) - announces her debut album True. A walk across the salt flats. A pixelated moon on a touchscreen. A song set on the final day on earth. A song you can't send to someone, because they're no longer there. True, the debut album from Tenderness - the solo project of Katy Beth Young (Peggy Sue, Deep Throat Choir) - leads you by the hand through scenes like these, on deceptively simple, country-adjacent songs that shimmer with electric guitars and drones and licks of pedal steel. Songs that look sideways at romance and grief and technology. Songs that break hearts with their precise and thoughtful beauty as well as their sadness. Songs that are, by turns, tender like a touch, tender like a bruise.True is a solo album in name, but a communal one in spirit, made alongside producer Euan Hinshelwood (Younghusband, Cate Le Bon), who contributes bass as well as layers of electric guitars, synths and drones. Longtime collaborators appear throughout: Peggy Sue's Clay Slade and Olly Joyce, La Luz's Marian Li-Pino, and members of Deep Throat Choir. Pedal steel comes from Harry Bohay (Aldous Harding, Sylvie). Backing vocals come from Berlin musicians Martha Rose, Dandy Deniz and Benjamin Gregory. The album's finishing touches - strings and synths - were added by producer Chloe Kraemer. The result is an album that feels both deeply personal and quietly expansive - a collection of songs born from solitude but shaped by community, rooted in heartache yet reaching toward something hopeful. FFO: Mitski, Angel Olsen, Waxahatchee, Laura Marling