Cat Clyde, the alt-folk artist from Ontario, Canada, released her fourth full-length album, “Mud Blood Bone,” via Concord Records. While the album leans heavily into introspection, its strongest moments come when Clyde balances that weight with melodic warmth.
Produced with Drew Vandenberg (Toro Y Moi, Faye Webster, S.G. Goodman) and including a co-write with Courtney Marie Andrews, this first release with Concord arrives in a sonic overlap: the rockabilly grit of contemporaries like Sierra Ferrell, The Deslondes, or Nick Shoulders, meets the vulnerable, folk rock volatility of Big Thief or Angel Olsen.
Throughout her writing sessions for Mud Blood Bone, Clyde drew on her Métis heritage and invoked a deep reverence for nature to redefine her relationship to love. Learning from the natural world, she took solace in its cyclicality. Leading up to the release of the album, Clyde released a number of singles, including the lead single ‘Another Time,’ which speaks to life’s constant change. The track closes the album with a slow acoustic unfolding that builds into a powerful crescendo, anchored by Clyde’s airy, close-mic’d vocals.
She also released a cover of the 1960 Marty Robbins track “My Love,” melding the swaying country western croon of Robbins’ original with Clyde’s swirl of blues, folk, and rockabilly. Clyde lends the track a cavernous sense of scale, layering sweeping instrumentation on top of its loping acoustic chords and lyrical tributes to the beauty of the natural world.
Of her rendition of the track, Clyde offers, “I heard the original Marty Robbins version of this song in 2023. Hearing it felt like a great clue in my search for meaning in love. It reminded me of the love that surrounds me in the natural world, and how it all lives within me as well.”
Clyde’s relationship with music began through a vent in the floor. “I’d lift the rug up to hear my grandfather playing his fiddle along to cassette tapes in the basement.” This was in Northern Ontario at summertime family gatherings, the best of which would culminate in impromptu family jam sessions. “I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t singing.” After a fleeting, childhood stint with the piano, Clyde took on the guitar around age thirteen. “When I discovered Blues music, well, that changed my life.” The riffs of Lead Belly and Robert Johnson were too complicated for her small, preteen hands to master, but they inspired Clyde to write her own songs. She busked through adolescence, joined a punk band called Shit Bats in college, and recorded her first album in a friend’s basement before she graduated. Four full-lengths later, Clyde’s voice vibrates with that ferocious confidence of one who’s been doing this her whole life.
You can listen to the album now and also check out Cat’s behind-the-scenes look at the making of the album, now on YouTube.
