Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

BIOGRAPHY

Alec Ounsworth had weathered a storm. For over 20 years, that’s how every Clap Your Hands Say Yeah album arrives, Ounsworth transmuting grief, heartbreak, and confusion into music that seeks renewed hope. Burned, his seventh album under the CYHSY moniker, is no different. In the six years since New Fragility, Ounsworth experienced a prolonged season of loss — the dissolution of a relationship, the deaths of several loved ones. With time and distance, he took the darkness of those experiences and channeled it into 10 vibrant new songs fueled by the cathartic live energy of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah onstage. Ounsworth produced the album with frequent collaborator Nick Krill, before Dave and Mike Fridmann provided mixing.

Equally inspired by psychology classes and some of Ounsworth’s favorite literature, Burned became not just a mechanism through which to purge recent events, but also to wrangle with cycles of generational trauma. Across key tracks “Fever Of The Mind,” “Late Wish,” “Does Anybody Work Here?,” and “Burned,” Ounsworth delivers urgent snapshots of all we witness, lose, and accept as we figure out how we became the people we became. Yet with each quintessentially surging Clap Your Hands arrangement, Burned captures the moment when we hold the highs and lows together, and color floods back into our lives.

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