22-year-old Irish singer-songwriter Bridie Monds-Watson is returning from a four-year hiatus to release her sophomore album under the name SOAK on April 26. Titled Grim Town, the record follows 2015’s Before We Forgot How To Dream which was critically acclaimed and Mercury Prize-nominated, making Monds-Watson one of the youngest nominees in the history of the prize at 19.
Today, she’s shared a timely new single from the record, a tenderhearted lovelorn song called “Valentine Shmalentine” that Monds-Watson says is “the result of both giving into Hallmark and being a dramatic bitch.” It follows the recent singles "Everybody Loves You" and "Knock Me Off My Feet."
In a previous statement about Grim Town, Monds-Watson described it as “a dystopia that I’ve created in my brain: me on the inside, processed into a pretend location. The way I could wrap my head around a lot of what I was going through was to make it feel like something quite physical and real. Once I had the idea of the album being an actual location, exploring the dynamics of this town and what it would look or sound like felt like the right way to give my mental state a personality.”
Listen to “Valentine Shmalentine” and watch SOAK’s KEXP in-studio performance from 2015 below.
The new album follows Mercury-nominated debut Before We Forgot How To Dream.
"Everybody Loves You" is the first we've heard from the young Irish artist since her acclaimed debut Before We Forgot How To Dream
Unlike a lot of teenagers out there, 19-year-old Bridie Monds-Watson, a.k.a. SOAK, seems to handle success with a modest and casual confidence. Her career has taken off rather quickly, from writing songs in the basement of her home in Derry, Northern Ireland, to flying from country to country perfo…
