LP Transparent vinyl
Chrysalis Records (2024) US
Alternative pop visionary Gia Ford has announced her highly-anticipated debut album Transparent Things for release on 13th September via Chrysalis Records. Recorded in LA at the renowned Sound City Studios with legendary producer Tony Berg (known for his work on celebrated albums including Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps and Punisher), Transparent Things is an immersive collection that showcases how Gia is able to craft songs like no other artist of her generation.
For Gia, those figures on the fringes of society are by far the most fascinating. Her songs tell the stories of the downtrodden to the downright dangerous. And through them, we begin to hear familiar, uncomfortable truths about ourselves.
The theme of alienation runs through the album. “Most of the characters in these songs are outcasts, all with unique ways of feeling on the periphery, somehow,” Gia says. While each song operates in its own realm, their subject matters create a throughline of eccentricity that turns Transparent Things into an odyssey of outcasts. “Thematically it has a mythical quality, stemming from the repeated references to creatures, ghosts and undefined spirits. It’s a world of its own, where the characters have more in common than I initially thought was possible.”
Arguably no song better encapsulates the character of “the other” than new single ‘Paint Me Like a Woman’, released today. The song is from the perspective of a woman who feels herself morphing into the villain as a result of abuse and mistreatment at the hands of all the men in her life. Gia explains: “It is a look inside her mind as she feels herself drifting away from who she really is; allowing her rage to weave itself into the fabric of her being. It's a comment on how we hurt each other, how we change each other, and a question: who gets punished for this terrible nature we have all, to varying degrees, embodied?”