From prescribed burns in the woods to an old barn hit by a strike of lightning, the unforgiving nature of flames is a surefire way to accelerate change. New York City existentialist and folkstar Allegra Krieger found herself at the crossroads of her new record, Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, when she was awakened one night last year by a plume of gray smoke in her eighth-story Manhattan apartment. A few lithium batteries had exploded in an e-bike shop on the first level of the Chinatown building block, sparking a destructive, life-taking fire. While Krieger thankfully escaped, the incident would become the entry point for her fourth studio album—a project that spotlights the nihilistic, everyday beauty of mortality and the cozy comfort that can be found in how little any of this matters.
“What do we know about living? / What do we know about dying?” Krieger asks on the record’s thesis track, “One or the Other,” as she tells us the story of the battery fire. On it, survivor’s guilt rises, as does her gratitude for making it out alive. It’s a defining stroke of genius for a songwriter who paints the night’s events with heartbreaking honesty. “I asked myself what I could have done different / But was just so thankful to some god I woke / So thankful,” she hums before telling us about her neighbor Nancy, who wasn’t as lucky. The writing here is almost harsh in its straightforwardness, never growing sensational in its confessionals. Life and death are the one true binary; it’s either one or the other.
Allegra Krieger’s fourth album arrives barely a year after her last project, I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane, and skates with ease between cosmic surrealism and grounded, conversational lyrics. One of the most significant and unmissable moments on Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine awakens in its lead single, “Never Arriving.” The track doesn’t feel like an avant garde artist doing their best to make nice with a broader audience. Instead, it’s a detour into a refreshing candidness about sex and death. This duality appears across the album and is a natural evolution of the life/death binary Krieger explores so effortlessly. Sure, she is at her catchiest here, as her band kicks up into an electric, soulful tone, but that’s something worth celebrating.
It’s not to say that Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine is all that inaccessible. It’s a tight record that could easily play in a public space and provide soothing sonar to pop music civilians without disruption. Krieger herself was listening to popular music while writing the album, specifically the modern-day songwriting icon SZA. This influence can’t be spotted immediately, yet both women produce a certain casual-yet-cutting poetry that can be easily shared with any music lovers in your life.
Another standout that summarizes Krieger’s uniquely graceful voice as a songwriter is “Into Eternity,” which again investigates the causally blurred lines between life and death. It’s atheism at its most compassionate. The belief that death is nothingness is often unfairly seen as a glass-half-empty perspective. Krieger, however, finds the beauty in death’s indifference and languishes in trying to take it less seriously. “We walk into eternity / Under nukes and trees and changing skylines / That we walk into eternity / Under fire and rain and the undefined,” she sings, celebrating the good and the bad with the same respect. Destruction and growth are treated the same because, in the end, that’s what they are. The lyrics on “Into Eternity” also describe the miracle of a yellow butterfly fluttering through a “piss-stained” New York City; these contrasting visions of gold are lovely, compassionate nihilism from a songwriter with a singular perspective.
It might be easy to perceive the lyricism on Infinity Machine as stream-of-consciousness, but I’d argue that Krieger’s poetry is a well-oiled, ghostly machine only she sees in full. And the music it produces is as heartbreakingly mature as inherited antique jewelry. This New York City musician couldn’t have been nurtured by an environment any more different than the suburbs of Ontario, yet the music tangentially reminds me of the achingly Canadian early songs Sarah Harmer, who wrote from a flooded “Basement Apartment,” a space that notably opposite contradicts that of Krieger’s NYC apartment tower, which would go up in flames 20 years later.
Allegra Krieger sings of the “rubber tires on a lonely road” that take her down the album’s sunset track, “New Mexico.” Like much of the album, it gives glimpses into a somber Americana that you might also find on Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road or Aimee Mann’s “Ghost World.” “Let the echo fly light and free, and you can start forgetting me,” Krieger concludes on Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine, but it’s safe to say that there’s still plenty of time for the world to find her and her singular style of cosmic introspection.
Read our recent feature on Allegra Krieger here.
