Katy Pinke – Strange Behavior
NYC’s Katy Pinke announces new album, Strange Behavior on Glamour Gowns February 21, 2025.
She released the single “Oranges” today.
“High School,” the authoritative opening track of Katy Pinke’s sophomore album Strange Behavior, begins at the beginning, as unapologetically as possible. “Giving you head on the bed, I wanted to know/What was my crime and why was I broke/Being my first time I thought you might show me/Something,” she recalls, tracing the lifeline of a deep wound back to its source. The Manhattan-based singer, songwriter, painter, and theater-maker relays her narrator’s origin story with humor and sadness, the discomfiting gift of hindsight lending it newfound perspective and depth. Each successive memory seems to be pushing her closer to transcendence—a recurring plot arc in Pinke’s catalog of spare and off-center experimental rock songs. “And with every song/A little bit less of you/A little bit less not true/To myself,” she sings. In this way, each track on Strange Behavior—a mercurial, viscerally affecting big swing of a record—feels like a transformative act. The songs become mechanisms that help her protagonists navigate through emotional adversity, push against the limitations of their understanding of the world, and ultimately make peace with ambiguity.
Many songs in Pinke’s deep catalog outline this process, including those on the stripped down self-titled debut album she released earlier this year (scored for just guitar, voice, and drum set). Pinke’s folk-inflected compositions cheerfully disregard verse-chorus structures, often maintaining a breezy and inviting quality even during their most gut-wrenching moments. Her lithe and disarming soprano is reminiscent of folk iconoclast Connie Converse and jazz singer Blossom Dearie (who she borrows a song from for Strange Behavior) outlining instinctively but expertly shaped melodies. Pinke’s catalog of original music is vast, as regular attendances of her frequent concerts and multimedia productions in the New York City area and beyond can attest. Her creative restlessness and penchant for reinvention are on full display in the live arena; she frequently assembles fresh bands for each successive gig, offering up untested sets of music or reframing old standards with radical new deliveries.
On Strange Behavior, Pinke seems to be synthesizing everything she has learned during her evolution in the live space over the past half-decade or so. She is in full arranger and co-producer mode, luxuriating in a wider dynamic range, juxtaposing odd electroacoustic disturbances, and rocking out full-tilt. While her first album documented her live presence at its most elemental, this record enhances that energy with inventive textures that underscore and complicate her narrators’ psychological trajectories. The choices made by her team of collaborators—including multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Nico Osbourne (Nicomo), guitarist Will Graefe and drummer Jeremy Gustin of Star Rover, revered singer-songwriter Trixie Whitley, and more—provide them with more stakes and an immediate holistic appeal. For instance, the lightly soulful track “Look Around” bubbles up around a simple four-chord sequence, with Pinke’s pacing quickening and vocal range slowly ascending through the end of the song. The band’s fugue-like echoes of the melody line function like a thicket of emotions, slowly compounding and mapping onto each other.
TOUR DATES
10.05.24 – North Adams, MA @ Studio 9 Porches
10.06.24 – Willimantic, CT @ Willimantic Records
10.09.24 – Brooklyn, NY @ Sultan Room*
10.11.24 – Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA*
10.12.24 – Washington, DC @ Songbyrd Music House*
10.13.24 – Wilmington, DE @ Smalls Music Shop
10.14.24 – Baltimore, MD @ Normals Books & Records^
* w/Delicate Steve
^ w/Linda Smith
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