Santigold
Welcome to the Year of Indie Sleaze
The indie sleaze era had it all. Sky Ferreira hanging out with Taylor Swift at Katy Perry’s birthday party. A maximalist approach to fashion (no one would bat an eye at pairing shutter shades with a bikini top indoors). Skins parties that recreated the debauchery from the hit British series. Fan-run Tumblr accounts dedicated to the relationship of Alexa Chung and Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner. Wild nights out captured with cameras instead of phones — with flash photography a must. It’s been a decade since this cultural phenomenon ended, but it’s left an enormous footprint on music and fashion. The initial spark came shortly after 9/11, with bands like the Strokes and Interpol releasing their debut albums. It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that indie sleaze became a widespread craze — rea...
Book Club: Santigold Recites Rumi by Heart
Book Club is a monthly series from Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, exploring the literature that inspires some of our favorite musicians. Whether it’s a music biography that got them through the slog of tour, the poetry collection that eked into their most poignant lyrics, or the novel that sparked a rock opera, we’ll get to the bottom of it so you can add it to the top of your book stack. This month, we speak to Santi White, the imaginative and futuristic artist best known for her music as Santigold. Santi White weaves a seamless web of captivating influences into her complexly glorious pop as Santigold, with her erudite love of punk, breakbeat, new wave and dancehall informing four singularly voiced albums and two aesthetically broad mixtapes. Santigold’s one-of-a-kind visuals—from costumes...
Santigold’s Long-Awaited Album Spirituals Is Due in September
Santigold will return this fall with her first album in six years. Spirituals is due Sept. 9 on her own Little Jerk Records, with distribution by Secretly Distribution. The album includes the previously released single “High Priestess” and the new song “Ain’t Ready,” which is out today. “It was one of those songs where as soon as I opened my mouth, the whole melody just poured out,” Santigold says of “Ain’t Ready,” which includes collaborations with Illangelo, Dre Skull and SBTRKT. “There were no words but all the emotion was there. To me, the song sounded full of struggle and perseverance. It sounded like a battle, and I wanted the production to sound tough, to mirror that grit. I struggled to find the right lyrics at first, but when I got them right, and I started singing them one night ...
