Niecy Blues - Exit Simulation [LP]

South Carolina singer and producer Niecy Blues describes her songwriting process like an undertow: "I feel a strange pull, and let it carry me, following swirling leaves... whole days roll by, forgetting about the body." Their full-length debut, Exit Simulation, captures this sense of deep-rooted divination, cycling between simmering ballads, ghosted R&B, downtempo gospel, and looped vocal improvisations-often within the same track. The title is taken from a science fiction novel she read during the purgatory of the pandemic, alluding to a dimensional ideation of departure-"the permission to imagine leaving." Recorded in her current home of Charleston, she characterizes the album's mood in terms both reflective and raw: an exploration of things suppressed, foundations beginning to crack, "talking myself off a ledge." The music of Niecy Blues transposes reverie and reckoning into emotive devotionals of keys, guitar, bass, synth, and bewitched voice, steeped in sacred atmospheres gleaned from a youth spent in a religious Oklahoma household: "My first experience with ambient music was church-slow songs of worship, with delay on the guitar... even if you don't believe, you feel something."