Where is my love? Cat Clyde howls, opening her new album ‘Mud Blood Bone’ with abandon.
Can’t find my love? It’s not the somber lament of a longing woman, but a feral eruption, the roar of
an animal on the edge. Her voice crumples with dismay, a swampy croon over romping keys. I got a
hole in my chest / I can’t take the emptiness / Where is my love? It’s the essential question of ‘Mud
Blood Bone,’ a void eleven frenetic songs sizzle to fill.
The Canadian songwriter’s fourth full-length and first release with Concord Records finds her at a
point of personal evolution. “I wrote these songs at the end of a big cycle,” she shares. “Love was
not present in my life and I didn’t know where to find it or how to get it back.” Essential to the
search, Clyde discovered, was relinquishing old notions. “In the past, I felt like love chained me,
controlled me, put me in a cage.”
Produced with Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman) and recorded at
Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia, Clyde’s new collection exists in a sonic overlap; the
rockabilly grit of contemporaries like Sierra Ferrell, The Deslondes, or Nick Shoulders, meets the
vulnerable, folk rock volatility of Big Thief or Angel Olsen. “Drew was the perfect person to help
me assemble the players and bring this collection to life,” says Clyde. “Everyone brought their own
unique gift to the studio. I create from a place of instinct, and once we all locked in, it felt easy, and
we were able to capture the songs live.” Liam Duncan of Boy Golden was another integral
collaborator. “He was there from day one demos to the album’s finalization,” Clyde explains, “as a
great friend, musician, and anchor to the original sentiment of each song.”
Clyde’s foundational relationship with music began through a vent in the floor. “I’d lift the rug up to
hear my grandfather playing his fiddle along to cassette tapes in the basement.” This was in North
Ontario at summertime family gatherings, the best of which would culminate in impromptu family
jam sessions. “I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t singing.” After a fleeting, childhood
stint with the piano, Clyde took on the guitar around age thirteen. “When I discovered Blues
music—well—that changed my life.” The riffs of Lead Belly and Robert Johnson were too
complicated for her small, preteen hands to master, but they inspired Clyde to write her own songs.
She busked through adolescence, joined a punk band called Shit Bats in college, and recorded her
first album in a friend’s basement before she graduated. Four full-lengths later, Clyde’s voice
vibrates with that ferocious confidence of one who’s been doing this her whole life.
‘Mud Blood Bone’ exudes a nomadic independence. Clyde penned some of the songs in her 1973
Boler trailer, parked temporarily on a farm in Ontario, others on a narrow boat in England, and the
rest in transit from one festival to another, letting lyrics stream freely from a jetlagged dream state.
“Constantly being on the move, having to navigate new environments, it forces me to be present,
and to confront my own feelings,” Clyde says. “You can’t hide behind comforts. You have to know
exactly who you are, and what you want.”
The result is uninhibited, raw, pure; it’s the sound of personal truth discovered in real time. Clyde is
cracked wide open and what spills out—equal parts despair, invocation, discovery, and
celebration—is the love she went looking for. “When I listen to this album, I know that my power
belongs to me. Love lives inside of me. I can always find it.”
‘Mud Blood Bone’ will be out March 13, 2026.
