Amoeba Music

Jessica Pratt celebrates her new album, Here In The Pitch (out May 3rd on Mexican Summer), with a live, in-store performance and album signing at Amoeba Hollywood Wednesday, May 8 at 5pm!

Show is free/all-ages. To attend the post-show signing, purchase Here in the Pitch in-store only at Amoeba Hollywood starting May 3rd.

See Jessica Pratt live at Pappy & Harriet's in Pioneertown June 21st! Tickets here.

From the opening seconds of “Life Is,” it’s clear that Here in the Pitch is a very different kind of album from Jessica Pratt. The revered Los Angeles artist has become one of the most singular and distinctive songwriters of her generation, largely through the bewitching sound of her acoustic guitar and vocals: a mystical, elusive blend that conjures deep emotional responses from her devoted (and patient) audience. To introduce her first release in half-a-decade, however, she greets us with neither her breathtaking vocals nor the delicate, sophisticated strum of her guitar. Instead, Pratt’s fourth album begins with a percussion roll that nods instantly to the grand, orchestral style of ’60s pop hits like the Walker Brothers’ “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.”

“In a way, it’s kind of a false flag,” Pratt admits of this introduction, considering the rest of the record is just as emotionally intimate and stark as fans have come to expect. “But I also feel like it’s a statement of intention.”

Indeed, five years after her breakthrough album, 2019’s Quiet Signs — which marked her first time working in a studio after years of home-recording — Pratt has re-emerged with new ambition and new parameters for what her music can be. Working once again at Gary’s Electric Studio in Brooklyn, NY with her trusted collaborators, multi-instrumentalist/engineer Al Carlson and keyboardist Matt McDermott, Pratt also enlisted the rhythm duo of bassist Spencer Zahn and percussionist Mauro Refosco (David Byrne, Atoms for Peace) to help realize her vision.

For Here in the Pitch, Pratt quickly envisioned a more expansive set of influences — “big panoramic sounds that make you think of the ocean and California” — and the results are evident in the dynamic repertoire of instruments accompanying her graceful, dreamlike melodies. If Pratt’s early albums — 2012’s word-of-mouth favorite Jessica Pratt and 2015’s devastatingly beautiful On Your Own Love Again — seemed beamed in from a dimly lit bedroom somewhere in the distant past, these songs stand on more solid ground. The tone can range from comforting and even chipper (“When you’ve fallen out, get both feet on the ground,” she reassures during the chiming chorus of “Life Is”) to a haunted, malevolent quality that feels entirely new in her songbook.

“I never wanted it to take this long. I’m just a real perfectionist,” she explains of the album’s long gestation, which spanned from summer 2020 to the spring of 2023. “I was just trying to get the right feeling, and it takes a long time to do that.” With Here in the Pitch, Pratt comes as close as she ever has to this feeling of perfection, to music you can reach out and touch in the air around you, to summoning with every note the hope and mystery, the horror and romance, that lingers within the silence. Through these songs, she suggests those qualities are precisely what keeps us listening, over and over again, on the edge of our seats.

     — Sam Sodomsky