Queer Brooklyn- based indie rock meets folk pop singer/songwriter Camille Schmidt has just released her highly anticipated debut album Nude #9. The ten-track collection is a series of revealing and personal portraits—of herself, her family, and former and future lovers. Seamlessly blending the sounds of synth-pop, folk, indie rock and punk, Schmidt’s debut album is a rapturous portrait of a songwriter realizing her full potential.
As a child, Camille would sit at the kitchen table with the models who posed nude in her parents’ art studio. She occasionally wondered why, at the end of these life drawing sessions, paintings of the female body in its most vulnerable form would be given an impersonal title like “Girl with Dogs #3” or “Woman Sleeping #7.”
The Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter cracked open the folk-rock songbook on her debut EP Good Person, released this past June. While breakout single “Your Game” was a queer kiss-off set to the rollicking sound of alt-country legends like Lucinda Williams and Alison Krauss, there was a soft power in her wistful approach to heartbreak on “Bumblebee Drinks Lavender.” These six songs, which showcased Schmidt’s hallmark ability to balance an innately wry sense of humor with moments of quietly devastating self-reflection, hinted at something greater than the sum of their folk-rock parts.
On Nude #9, despite growing her ensemble, Camille Schmidt sounds more present than ever before, the unflinching honesty in her lyrics front and center. Broadening her palette to include starry-eyed ambient soundscapes and thrumming post-punk rhythms while digging deeper into romance, sexuality, friendship, and her own sense of self, Nude #9 is sincere and whimsical, hilarious and deeply felt.
“A lot of these songs were written completely stream of consciousness,” she said of the album. Writing without self-editing was freeing, allowing thoughts to unspool before she had a chance to doubt her intuition. The result is an album that feels at once familiar and completely new at every turn.
Giving this one a spin?