There is a moment in ‘Your Tongue is a Daffodil,’ Crying Madam’s new single, where the line between nature and music dissolves.
A birdcall, the crackle of foliage underfoot, the sound of breath—each one bleeding into the other until it becomes less a song and more a landscape.
It’s an invitation, sure, but an invitation that asks more from you than most music does. It asks you to lose yourself in the space between sounds, to follow the whispers of the world rather than cling to a melody.
Crying Madam‘s vocals are soft, but always on the edge of breaking, floating through the mix with a tenderness that is nearly imperceptible.
There’s no urgency here, only an unspoken tension between the things we want and the things we fear we’ll lose.
It’s not a song that demands anything but attention. ‘Your Tongue is a Daffodil’ becomes a meditation on spring, not as a season of renewal but as one of possibility, delicate and precarious.
Then, ‘Smell of a Bleeding Heart’ hits, and it’s a different world entirely—sudden, messy, and more than a little raw.
The track drips with a sonic uncertainty, all jagged edges and unmoored beauty. It’s dissonant, yes, but it feels like the way a forest may look after a storm: torn apart and yet somehow still alive.
Crying Madam dives headfirst into shoegaze territory here, but it’s not just an echo of an era—it’s a reclamation.
The reverb-soaked vocals weave through the atmospheric haze in a way that feels haunting, yes, but also oddly liberating. This is the sound of fragility fighting to be seen.
There’s something in this genre, the avant-garde-meets-shoegaze landscape, that’s been too often underexplored in recent years.
Bands like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, and even more contemporary acts like Beach House and Grouper have shown us how distortion and atmosphere can pull emotion from the depths, but Crying Madam does something else entirely.
Instead of simply imitating a sound, they shift and fracture it, pulling elements of the natural world into a genre built on the artificial, creating something new in the process.
It’s the organic intermingling of the personal and the universal, like Zola Jesus’ expansive soundscapes or the atmospheric, dream-drenched textures of Cocteau Twins—where the boundaries between noise and melody blur in ways that feel both unsettling and comforting.
What I find so compelling about this release isn’t just its refusal to be easily categorized—it’s the space it allows for emotion to emerge on its own terms.
There’s no dictating how you should feel. You’re left to decide whether the beauty in ‘Your Tongue is a Daffodil’ feels like something to hold onto or something doomed to wilt.
In ‘Smell of a Bleeding Heart,’ you’re asked to witness something that refuses to make peace with itself—a track that feels like both chaos and release.
Crying Madam’s music works best when you stop trying to fit it into a neat little box. It’s not about the sound of one particular genre; it’s about an emotional space that’s wide open, where the boundaries between the personal and the universal are often unclear.
If this is just the beginning, I’m intrigued to see how she’ll continue to pull apart the natural and the unnatural, the comforting and the destructive, as the year unfolds.
There’s a vastness here—one that’s just as much about the music as it is about what you bring to it.
Now, let the music guide you into this immersive, evocative world that Crying Madam has so beautifully crafted.
