Saddle Creek’s newest signing Ada Lea has announced her debut album ‘what we say in private’ will be released on July 19th, 2019. The Montreal-based artist has also shared the video for lead single ‘the party,’ which Gorilla vs. Bear debuted, describing the song as “a stark and intimate introduction to Ada Lea’s vivid, often mercurial sound.”

“‘The Party’ came about after spending a magical night on the town with close friends. The song kind of just wrote itself. I always kept trying to make it a longer song, but nothing seemed to fit — or it felt like it was divulging too much,” Ada Lea says of the gently building, intimately hushed track.

“I wanted to capture that delightfully unsatisfying quality of the night; being together but wanting something more to happen, yet revelling in the power that had brought us all together at that special moment. That’s life, though…isn’t it? When you’re truly living the moment, you get home and wish you could live it again and again.”

To Ada Lea, who is also a painter, music and visual art are different vessels for communicating similar ideas. “It’s a world that I can build around me and sit inside,” she says. Through all her art, Ada Lea explores the concept of womanhood as it feels and looks to her, as well as love and how it transforms over time. She doesn’t shy away from exploring uncomfortable and painful emotions, either. With the brightness of love, strength, and hope contrasted with the darkness of loss, suffering, isolation, and abandonment, ‘what we say in private’ is a varied and vivid record that constantly seems to shift in the light, bringing together all the intricate influences she’s collected over the years.

‘what we say in private’ began with a need to document the ending of an important romantic relationship. Following a tormented period of staying up all night (sometimes days at a time), frantically painting or writing songs as a means of coping, she journaled for 180 days in the hope of finding herself again. She conducted this period of analysis and introspection in private, like most of her creative pursuits, and the process eventually resulted in a rebirth: a rediscovery of self and a new sense of freedom and self-acceptance. These chaotic feelings and the resulting catharsis are deeply felt in the final recording of ‘what we say in private’. Ada Lea wanted the album to feel like a journal entry from those 180 days as she cycled through emotions. Throughout, she expresses feelings and thoughts that all humans experience behind closed doors and alone, but are conditioned to keep to themselves.

‘What we say in private’ truly comes alive thanks to the way these recordings utilize the very real world around them, rather than shutting it all out. Expanding the boundaries of the studio, Ada Lea, alongside the record’s producer Tim Gowdy, found new and nuanced ways of allowing the songs to flourish. “It was all part of a bigger idea,” she says. “We stuck microphones out of windows in mid-January to capture the chilly nighttime sounds. We recorded snow removal trucks backing into the lot and aeroplanes flying overhead. We used voice memos, a piece from here and another from there. I had built a room with the demos of my songs and Tim helped to add a second level.”

As such, the album reverberates with human warmth, defined by the signature characteristics that can be found throughout — as on ‘the party,’ which fittingly comes wrapped up in static white noise, a soft atmosphere lingering in the distance and gently surrounding the stark instrumentation that is gradually introduced.

Ada Lea will head out on tour in support of Angelo De Augustine throughout the U.S. in May.