Grace Cummings has released ‘Bloodhorse!’, the title track and final preview of her new album Bloodhorse!, out August 14 via Virgin Music Australia.
Stream it HERE
Following last month’s ‘FAKE’, the new track pushes further into the record’s central themes of power, vulnerability, abuse and escape. At its centre is Cummings’ remarkable voice, moving between restraint and force as the song turns its equine imagery into a metaphor for anxiety, expectation and the exhausting demand to keep moving.
The title comes from an archaic term for a thoroughbred racehorse expected to win. For Cummings, the animal’s combination of nervous energy, physical power and vulnerability provided a way into something considerably more personal.
“When I go to sleep at night, I don’t rest,” she explains. “My eyes are shut but it’s like I’m waiting in the stalls, waiting, waiting. My dreams are full of nightmares. Nothing is calm. And as soon as I open my eyes, I start fucking running.”
The song also emerged from a visit to a beauty clinic, where Cummings was asked to look into a mirror and identify something she disliked about herself. After pointing to her furrowed brow, she was given Botox, leaving her unable to fully move her face for three months.
The experience became another strand of ‘Bloodhorse!’, connecting the expectation to appear happy with the more complicated reality underneath. Cummings describes feeling as though her emotions were trapped, unable to register physically even when she cried.
A video directed by Tori Styles accompanies the single, keeping things deliberately simple and theatrical and leaving Cummings and the song to carry the weight.
Bloodhorse! follows Cummings’ acclaimed 2024 album Ramona, the record that pushed the Melbourne singer-songwriter towards a considerably larger international audience. Like its predecessor, the new album was recorded in Topanga Canyon, California with Grammy-nominated producer Jonathan Wilson, whose credits include Father John Misty, Angel Olsen and Margo Price.
