Pearla’s music radiates with indiscriminate awe. Whether it’s the befuddling depths of nature or the profoundly strange spark of a dreaming mind—she takes it all as equal magic. Her debut album is populated by eccentric creatures and quixotic scenes, her takes on mortality, intimacy, and personal freeness glowing with an air of mystique. Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming is a world unto itself. The album will be released February 10, 2023, on Spacebomb Records.

Pearla is Nicole Rodriguez, a Brooklyn-based artist whose personal curiosities include finger puppets, writing songs with children, Virginia Woolf’s prose, and consulting the I Ching. On her 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities, she posed existential questions like outlines in a coloring book, and scribbled in attempts at answers through off-kilter indie pop and a bewildered spirit—a collection praised as “music worth getting lost in” by NPR Music’s Bob Boilen, who described it as “stunning, ethereal, beautiful.” But on her highly anticipated full-length, arriving three contemplative years later, Pearla submits to the brilliance in not knowing. On Oh Glistening Onion…’s heart-stopping centerpiece “Effort,” she wails with wistful power atop strings arranged by Spacebomb’s Trey Pollard: I don’t know why it takes so much effort to feel good these days. It’s this submission to mystery, to the inexplicable fluidity of living, that places Pearla at peace within its wild current.

aaronr22 is following