TL;DR:


• listen to Palimpsesa →
• Order Palimpsesa → (digital, vinyl, cassette)
• Recommended if you like: Vagabon, King Krule, Benét, McKinley Dixon, Orion Sun, Anjimile, Olive Klug, Lauryn Hill, Tracy Chapman, mountain-moving folk, rap, and soul

Reintroducing, Mal Devisa. The songwriting, liberation, and poetry project of the multifarious artist Deja Carr. At age 12, Carr began playing music when she and a group of friends started a band called Who'da Funk It? After five years of performing, writing, and recording, Carr began to learn bass as she compiled scraps of her forgotten songs. Based in Amherst, Massachusetts, the solo project Mal Devisa was soon born out of the slanted basement walls and busted dusty kick drums.

p: POND Creative

Starting in 2014 and breaking through with 2016's critically acclaimed Kiid, Mal Devisa's work spans a self-made spectrum of sound from gravitic, soulful rock to soliloquy to unabashed hip-hop. Although known for her unmistakable, smouldering voice and loop-based, bass-forward compositions, Carr's talents also extend to reaches of poetry and production, paralleled by aspirations to start both a youth foundation and Afrobeat Orchestra.

"Deja Carr's voice is a force of gravity, an instrument of rare range and seemingly limitless capacity for empathy. When she howls, her vocals clip into the red, and her rapping jolts you straight awake." -Pitchfork

The sound on her new anthology album Palimpsesa (a play on the word "Palimpsest" - a piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for new text) is a maelstrom of genre-defiant magic that spans jazz, folk, hip-hop, and experimental forms. Carr's lyrics are cleverly verbose, their delivery like lightning whispering into the haunting DIY spaces where Mal Devisa cut her teeth. Such boundless inspiration and style are central facets of Mal Devisa's work, whose sonically and narratively unrestrained passages teem with empathy and liberatory visions for a better world.

"Deja Carr's depth, musical range, and innate understanding of how to make her music spotlight itself help make her one of the most compelling new singer-songwriters in recent memory." -The FADER

♩ ♩ ♩ ♩

Order Order Palimpsesa cassette, vinyl, or digitally →


or listen on Amazon Music | Apple Music | Bandcamp | SoundCloud | Spotify | Tidal | Youtube

♩ ♩ ♩ ♩

Palimpsesa features some of Mal Devisa's earlier songs plus a whole fresh batch of previously unreleased material, newly mixed and fully remastered. Lead singles "Old Intro" and "Skyline Arms-Reach Out" flip between two distinct sides of the Mal Devisa coin, with the former highlighting Carr's effortless flow over a scrappy, boom-bap and the latter showcasing her sky soaring voice weaved in beautifully with art-pop atmospherics. It's a completely stunning return.

Palimpsesa tracklist:

SIDE A:

1. You Are My Sunshine
2. Next Stop
3. Icarus - Breakthrough
4. Vicious Nonbeliever (ft. God's Wisdom)
5. New Eardrums (prod. by Marco)
6. Dominatrix

SIDE B:

1. Old Intro
2. Never See Me Do It
3. Crowd Pleaser
4. The Room is Spinning
5. Contracts
6. Skyle Arms-Reach Out

SIDE C:

1. Fire
2. You Are All That You Need
3. To Be Unwilling
4. I Could Tell
5. The Skies
6. Dangerous
7. If You Are Waiting
8. Shomberg Isn't the Place
9. Slept On
10. Rum

SIDE D:

1. O Ivory
2. Sunrise (prod. by Marco)
3. My Potential
4. You Go to My Head
5. Forest
6. Raw as the Hands of the Sun
7. Forget That I