Katy Kirby is a New York-based singer-songwriter originally from Spicewood, Texas. She came up in Nashville, where she recorded her acclaimed 2021 debut Cool Dry Place, and has spent the years since becoming one of the more thoughtful songwriters working today.

Her second album Blue Raspberry marks a real leap: lush arrangements, ornate melodies, and lyrics that zero in on the specific textures of falling in love for the first time as a queer woman. Synthetic rose scent. Cubic zirconia. The choices someone makes about how to look after she wakes up in the morning. It's a record about artifice and intimacy and how those two things are less opposed than you'd think, and it sounds exactly as gorgeous as that idea deserves.