Eleven-time Juno Award winner Feist has released her critically acclaimed new album Multitudes via Interscope Records.
Recorded in a bespoke residential studio in the California Redwoods, Multitudes was produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Robbie Lackritz (The Weather Station, Bahamas, Robbie Robertson) and Mocky (Jamie Lidell, Vulfpeck, Kelela), with additional production by Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius) on “Borrow Trouble.”
The album has been receiving delightful praise from a number of publications including Pitchfork, which wrote, “When Multitudes gets fuller, weirder, and more unpredictable, it hits its peaks. ‘I Took All of My Rings Off’ plays like an ancient fable of enlightenment made modern. She removes the jewelry from her ears, fingers, and dreams, buries it in the dirt—and then things get cosmic.”
NME also got in on the fun in its four-star review, writing, “There’s something delightfully human about Multitudes and in Feist’s perspective as someone experiencing the ephemeral nature of life transmuted through a hopeful filter. There’s sadness here, but there’s also joy and as the tracks play out you get the sense that one can’t exist without the other.”
Feist’s sixth full-length and first release since 2017’s critically lauded Pleasure, Multitudes took shape soon after the birth of her daughter and sudden death of her father, a back-to-back convergence of life-altering events that left the Canadian singer/songwriter with “nothing performative in me anymore.” As she cleansed her songwriting of any tendency to obscure unwanted truths, Feist slowly made her way toward a batch of songs rooted in a raw and potent realism which is touched with otherworldly beauty.
Largely written and workshopped during an intensely communal experimental show of the same name through 2021 and 2022, the songs developed in parallel with and were deeply influenced by the mutuality of the unconventional experience. The Multitudes production, developed by Feist with legendary designer Rob Sinclair (David Byrne’s American Utopia, Peter Gabriel, Tame Impala) involved a subtle disarming of normalized conventions between performer and observer.
