Ngaiire has returned today to deliver news of her forthcoming third album, aptly titled 3. To celebrate the announcement, she’s also delivered her new single ‘Closer’.
The release of ‘Closer’ follows on from previous album singles ‘Boom’ and ‘Shiver’. In addition, 3 – which is set for release Friday, 27th August – marks the first album we’re getting from Ngaiire since 2016’s Blastoma.
“It’s about that desperation of lust and love that grows out of your secret fantasies for another and the silent afterthought of whether it’s wise to fall that hard because it might be short lived,” Ngaiire said of ‘Closer’ in a press statement.
“That level of unbridled want for someone coupled with religious guilt, heartbreak and the human need to have love reciprocated was a mean cocktail of emotions that I came to know quite well, even as a spectator.”
Going on to describe the album, which was born out of a trip to Ngaiire’s home of Papua New Guinea and subsequently thrown into disarray due to some lessons Ngaiire learned about herself.
“The project was meant to deconstruct people’s misconceptions of what a Papua New Guinean is because of how I constantly had to field useless enquiries from white people who wanted to know if we all still ate people or why I was so pretty for a Papua New Guinean,” she said.
“What I didn’t fully realise was how callous I’d gotten from trying to maintain a career as a Warabung, Morobe, Tolai, Niu Ailan post-colonial Papua New Guinean in a predominantly white space that operates on stolen indigenous land. Quite immediately this whole experience ended up being a very expensive therapy session on the damages code-switching can create for women of colour when trying to survive in spaces that don’t understand where you come from.”
The album, which Ngaiire said “is about letting go and accepting that everyone isn’t going to get me”, was written by Ngaiire and co-produced with Jack Grace.
“I am full to the brim of stories that many don’t have the privilege to hold within themselves; some I know quite well and some live deep in my DNA that I won’t have enough lifetimes to unpack,” Ngaiire continued.
“But the ones I know, I will tell how I want to because I can. So here is a collection of love letters to 3 entities – myself, my country and those I love both here and now departed.”
3 is out Friday, 27th August. Listen to ‘Closer’ below.
