Ziemba - The Braid (2026) [Hi-Res]

Bad angels on vacation, piss in the sea, that one pair of pants with a rip in the butt: All of It and more has a home on The Braid, the epic and boldly self-possessed new record by Ziemba, aka singer-songwriter, pianist, producer, and journalist René Kladzyk.

Her first album in nearly six years, The Braid is Kladzyk’s most potent and cutting vision to date. Building from the pop grandeur of her 2020 release True Romantic and the investigatory world-building of 2019 sci-fi musical ARDIS, The Braid is no less expansive but decidedly earthbound. “I pray to the wine in my glass, show me how all things pass,” Kladzyk pleads on “Boneflute,” a crystalline ballad at the center of the album. It’s not the only song that functions as a prayer: much of The Braid exists in active conversation with shadow worlds, a semi-mythical autobiography striving to weave the beauty and the horror together somehow, on a quest for grace.

Written and recorded slowly while working full time as a reporter covering the U.S. immigration system and the Department of Defense, The Braid contains some of Kladzyk’s most sophisticated, iconoclastic, and cinematic songwriting and production to date, characteristically in defiance of easy categorization. This record is a winding drive through exhilarated and contemplative folk rock (“The Pleasure Seekers,” “Open Up,” “The Perfect Rose”), lit by a baroque pop sun and a post-punk moon (“We Implode,” “Winter of My Heart”). In “Utopia,” Burt Bacharach and Elliott Smith join hands as key reference points, a glitzy yet melancholic wish for the afterlife in the form of “a rainbow I kept in my pocket.”

Recorded bi-coastally at Tonal Park in Washington, D.C. and Tropico Beauty in Los Angeles, The Braid features a near-orchestral assembly of players, with a feral trio at the center: Will Segerstrom’s (Mega Bog) whimsical guitar often manages to sound both like 1970s-era Richard Thompson and a mysterious chirping woodland creature, while virtuosic Don Godwin (Clear Channel, Bartees Strange, Too Free) does heavy lifting as co-producer, mixing and mastering engineer, drummer, bassist, and functions as a one-man brass section on several songs. Kladzyk’s voice is the album’s north star. Her command as a vocal stylist is striking not only for its mutability and power but its emotional depth and artistry. “I am so fully alive, so fully me when I sing” Kladzyk says, and it shows. “Just want to feel / Everything, everything” a chorus of Kladzyks sings jubilantly at multiple points throughout the album. Everything, all of it will be woven into this braid.

Like many songs on the album, “The Pleasure Seekers” is both true story and allegory – a “not-wise-man” at a bar in Montana really did tell Kladzyk the lessons he learned during a mushroom trip about hedonistic angels on a pleasure cruise to earth, and Kladzyk latched onto the idea. “At that time, I was grappling with my own tendency toward escapism, excess and addiction,” Kladzyk said. “The fantasy that, maybe this is what I was brought here to do – it held a real allure for me, delusional as it was.” The song is a fitting introduction to a record that carefully maps the boundaries between hope and fantasy, aiming for somewhere between transcendence and acceptance.

In “We Implode,” Kladzyk is in dialogue with her past self. “I wrote this song across the course of a decade,” she explains. “The first verses were composed while I was in the throes of a doomed relationship, and then I picked the song back up years later with the perspective of today.” The song features some of Kladzyk’s most deft and surprising arrangements, shape-shifting from Cleaners from Venus-esque post-punk to Zombies-tinged strings to a stunning synth pop bridge that harkens The Pretenders: somehow it works, the production time-travelling along with the lyrics.

“Open Up” shifts from analyzing relationships with a bird’s eye view to a microscope, delving into the mindgames that accompany the process of allowing someone to actually see you. “Dad used to say that I walk like my mother / Kind of like a duck,” Kladzyk sings about the embarrassing legacies of family and the desire to hide them from would-be romantic partners, all while pushing herself to fight the urge. “Open up,” she responds to herself. “Swallow me whole,” she dares. Other songs are invocations for the future. “When I wrote ‘All of It,’ I was envisioning the sort of bond I wanted to feel and writing from that perspective,” Kladzyk explains. “‘The Only Forever’” interpolates Octavia Butler’s Change Prayer from Parable of the Sower, while ‘Winter of My Heart’ was largely inspired by the epic James Merrill poem The Changing Light at Sandover,’” Kladzyk recalled, in which a lecture by the archangel Michael (acquired through Ouija board conversations) lays out a cosmology of love as the accumulated intelligence of all cellular structures, exemplified through the sun.