Blums unveils debut album, 'Sunk Cost Fantasy'
BLUMS UNVEILS SUNK COST FANTASY - LISTEN
DEBUT ALBUM OF SPRAWLING ART POP
ARRIVES TODAY VIA TAKE CARE RECORDS
WATCH THE OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO FOR “JUDY”
ALBUM RELEASE SHOW SET FOR AUGUST 25
AT NIGHT CLUB 101 IN NEW YORK CITY
WITH SUPPORT FROM MAY RIO - BUY TICKETS
Today, New York City’s Blums, the project of songwriter and musician Kelsea Feder, is excited to share her debut album, Sunk Cost Fantasy, via Take Care Records. After six years in the making, Feder delivers eleven dreamy art-pop tracks exploring themes of catharsis, memory, and the cycle of destructive behavior. Throughout the record, Blums plays on the concept of sunk-cost fallacy, a cognitive bias that causes someone to continue something because they have already invested their time and energy in it, even when doing so yields more risk than reward. Through confessional lyrics, she explores how she once viewed this self-destructive cycle through rose-colored lenses, and recounts what she had to do to finally break it. The album is an ethereal soundscape adorned with moody synths and sultry vocals reminiscent of early-2000s trip-pop.
The official music video for “Judy” premieres today, featuring Kelsea in a laundromat, complete with an emotive dance number as she ponders traumatic familial cycles. Named after her grandmother Judy, the song reflects the ghosts we're all haunted by and the pain we pass on through generations. As the track builds, Kelsea begins to tug at the pain inside of her, finding a never-ending rope of laundry that she's forced to drag with her. The viewer flashes between vignettes of discomfort and joy, as "Judy" concludes.
Speaking about the album, Kelsea shares, “I took a really long time to make this, basically 5 years. There was a grunge trio band version of most of this record in 2022 that I basically decided was not what I was going for. My bassist, Kirk, is brilliant and I’d trust him with my life. He said ‘Let’s make the pop album you want to make’, and we spent years throwing spaghetti at the wall. Making this was like a big messy collage. I give him a lot of praise for being patient with me while I took a lot of time to gestate and get clarity on where I wanted this project to go. The visual components are also really important for me, so even once the record was done, it took a lot of time to start compiling everything for the visual world, too.”
WATCH “JUDY”
LISTEN TO SUNK COST FANTASY
Arriving last month, "Salty" rises and falls with the melancholy of feeling like you aren't what someone wants, but you still have yourself at the end of the day. The official music video, directed by Anna Burka, features the NYC musician in a Juicy Couture tracksuit in her apartment, reflecting on heartbreak and finding comfort in her own presence. Built on fluctuating synths and inspired by a songwriting challenge amongst friends in the scene, the track's digital twinkles and high-to-low vocals document a heartbreak with care and levity.
"Cashout" kicked off the summer with pulsating synths and a driving kick drum punctuating every cutting lyric that Kelsea delivers. Reflecting on distressing memories and searching for a release, she ponders the cyclical nature of the highs and lows we often return to. The song bursts into operatic vocals and a cascade of drum beats, mirroring the chaos of an internal struggle between wanting to live in the moment and being forced to remember the past.
In April of this year, Blums debuted with the winding and weaving “Sinking/Soaring,” which chronicles the cyclical nature of self-torment. Inspired by Kelsea’s stint as a jazz club hostess, the track is laced with mellow vibraphone and delicate keys, building into a melodic spiral. Alongside the song, an official music video directed by Ava Burka and Marianna Kamiaklioyis documents a hazy, disillusioned world of dilapidated houses and glamorous performances. “Sinking/Soaring” turned the heads of Nina Protocol, Alternative Press, The Line of Best Fit, and more.
WATCH “SALTY”
WATCH “CASHOUT”
WATCH “SINKING/SOARING”
Blums is a project collaged out of fragments of time and every experience Kelsea has captured and coveted: a childhood spent tearing up VHS tapes of old Hollywood musicals, the move to New York to study at an actor’s conservatory, time cutting her teeth playing the Bushwick show circuit in a power-pop band, singing backup vocals on tour with friends’ bands, losing and rediscovering her footing in the rush of the slipstream. You could build universes out of the people she’s been, measure the dimensions of the fantasy waiting to be seized. You can’t quite hold a moonbeam in your hand, but once you’ve collated all of the people you’ve been before and the sounds they each made, maybe you could at least try to compress the moonbeam onto tape. Sunk Cost Fantasy is the culmination of years of writing and discovery.
Known for her memorable live performances, Blums has built a following within the New York scene and played with a range of contemporaries like May Rio, Bella Litsa, Nyxy Nyx and more. This spring, she previewed new material during an intimate set in Brooklyn, NY for artist Rachel Lime’s album release show at Union Pool and supporting Morning Silk at Night Club 101. On August 25, she’ll celebrate her album release at Night Club 101 in New York, NY with support from May Rio. For more information on upcoming performances, see below and follow the band on Instagram at @blums____ .
BLUMS
SUNK COST FANTASY
TAKE CARE RECORDS
1. Intro
2. Still
3. Sinking/Soaring - WATCH
4. Salty - WATCH
5. Celsius
6. Side of the Road
7. Cashout - WATCH
8. Triple A (as a healer)
9. Judy - WATCH
10. Further Away
11. Unspent
ABOUT BLUMS:
The rupture is usually the place to start—the place where an artist connects the fractured shards of every sound or movement or lightning strike that they’ve collected and marked as their own, spitting the collage of experience back out in even line breaks. As any musician will tell you, this slow expansion takes time. Cycles must rotate to their delight before these creations can snap them into useful, beautiful pieces. A constructed world that holds all of our being, delivered in spurts of glitchy drum samples and layers of voices projecting a prayer of solitude skyward, takes ages to render.
Almost a decade removed from those initial attempts at writing her own songs for the first time, Blums’s first full-length release comes in the form of Sunk Cost Fantasy—the title of which plays on the cyclical phenomenon of the sunk cost fallacy, in which one refuses to abandon a failing financial strategy due to the time or resources they’ve already dedicated towards it. Working with co-producer Kirk Palsma after several false starts in recording her own written material, the record saw Feder dedicate the collage of herself to tape over several years while also playing and singing live with local scene stalwarts like fantasy of a broken heart, May Rio, and Shallowhalo.
By honing her own artistic vision and playing chops over that recording period—backed up in the sessions mostly by musicians with jazz and classical backgrounds—she developed a firmer grasp on the sound Blums makes: chaotic and ephemeral, hook-forward but transient, a rose-tinged make-believe with sharp teeth, coming in hiccuping starts and stops. It might have come largely by throwing sounds at the wall to see what stuck on studio time, but the disorder operates within her clear artistic parameters. It comes in the lineage of the art-pop or singer-songwriter greats so many of her ilk have pulled from, sure, but through its recorded origins of trial-and-error, it also feels as exacting in its worldbuilding efforts as so many of those giants of each genre have made us feel. Opener “Intro” provides a fitting portal into the record’s world, pitched up and fragmented, before sending us headfirst into the Disney movie swirl of “Still,” floating on the power of its airy backing vocals and woozy strings over skittering percussion before the closing shove of drums knocks the dream off its axis.
These moments of disruption become the record’s driving emotional force, erupting the titular fantasy into something sacred and tangible, like where the warmth of “Celsius” is punctured by sampled noises that sound like they’re attempting to swallow the tale of distant love dying whole, or in the sputtering trip-hop interlude of “Side of the Road,” or the moment where acoustic ballad “Judy” bursts into a rhythm built on manipulated vocals. These moments are as trippy or bewildering as they are deeply felt, like you’re catching her scratching at the paradox of her desire through the door, relishing the messy sonic overload she might leave in your wake. For all the time the record took to fully realize, it plays like a burst of feeling that couldn’t be planned or rehearsed, only captured by a stroke of luck. “Cashout” builds to a fuzzy crescendo of vocalizations, written by Feder while walking manically around Maria Hernandez Park on the day of recording, and you feel like you’ve heard any constraints holding her back snap in your headphones.
Here’s the thing: escapism used to be easy. Even as we gain more man-made fantasy worlds to bury ourselves under, the circumstances around us have grown more dire and impossible to ignore. There is only so much fear the human body can hold at once before needing to dispel it, before the crush overwhelms. Blums, in its fully-realized glory, emerges as the sound of an artist who has known the moment before the wave crests and held out to discover her voice, if only to realistically capture what that near-collapse looked and sounded like. It’s the sound of searching for a cyclical break while treading water to keep yourself afloat, and the collage of ourselves that we can piece together if we finally force the break in the cycle we’re bound to. “Love unspent / It’s gotta go somewhere,” she sings repeatedly over the fairytale swoon of the record’s closing track, wishing for a place where she can prop those emotions up and stand by them, no running from the rupture.
If you say something enough times in a dream, you might make it your reality. In Sunk Cost Fantasy, the dream has already been pressed into tape and made tangible, folded into your hands. There’s nothing more real than that.
ABOUT TAKE CARE RECORDS:
Take Care Records is an independent record label based in Brooklyn, NY, built from a passion for music. Guided by the simple but profound mantra, “It’s no good unless it’s real,” the label focuses on fostering authentic artistic expressions that resonate on a personal level. Take Care maintains a close-knit connection with the city’s indie music scene, championing singular artists with creative integrity.
CONNECT WITH BLUMS:
YOUTUBE | INSTAGRAM | BANDCAMP
CONNECT WITH TAKE CARE RECORDS:
WEBSITE | BANDCAMP | INSTAGRAM | SUBSTACK
Photo Credit: Eleanor Petry
