Alt-pop singer MOTHICA has announced her new album, Kissing Death, set to be released on 23 August 2024 on her own label Heavy Heart Records, in partnership with Rise Records. Kissing Death will be a concept album that tells an immersive story across 12 tracks, with accompanying music videos that weave into each other.
She has also unveiled the first single from the album, ‘Doomed’. Commenting on the song, MOTHICA said:
“I think Doomed is a sibling of my song Forever Fifteen. It’s a melancholy ballad and has this shoegaze influence at the end of the song that swells up with intensity. I’ve heard people talk about gifted child syndrome, or about feeling like a disappointment compared to the accolades they were given as a young kid and I didn’t know other people felt the same way.
I was a smart kid with a bright future, and sometimes I feel like my depression sabotaged some of that light I had. In the second verse, I open up about my experience in my church youth group and my abusive youth pastor. When I was just coming out of middle school, I was awkward and insecure and I hoped church would be a safe place to make friends but I was taking advantage of at my most vulnerable. I wish I could go back and protect myself from some of the things I went through, and it was incredibly therapeutic to recreate my teenage bedroom for the music video. I casted my friend to play a younger version of me, adorned in 2009 emo warped tour era posters, and show this angsty misunderstood girl. I am terrified to put this song out but I showed the ending to my therapist and she teared up so I felt like this was an important song to lead the album with. It feels like a small sliver of my origin story”.
She added:
“I decided to make Death a love interest in a dark rom-com-style tale. Throughout the visuals, I’m seen in a therapist’s office explaining this complicated relationship as if describing a scorned lover. The music videos will be like ‘flashbacks’ of what I’m telling my therapist. On the first single ‘Doomed’, we go back in time to an angsty teenage version of me. This is my first brush with the Grim Reaper and I doodle pictures of him in my diary surrounded by hearts. Flash forward, I’m shown performing at a dive bar, clubbing, engulfed in self-destruction. He stalks me, and eventually even proposes marriage, and I leave him at the altar and run away. It ends with me and Death in couples therapy. I wanted the music to feel cinematic, like the soundtrack of a movie”.