with special guest Julia Cumming
GRAMMY award-winner Madison Cunningham returns with Ace, her third record for Verve Forecast. Depending on the game, an Ace can be the highest or lowest card, zero or infinity. A breakup feels similar—one path crumbles, while all others remain infinitely possible. How do you write about heartbreak when you’re going through it? Ace tracks every part of it: falling out of love, having your heart broken, and then falling in love again. Co-produced by Cunningham and Robbie Lackritz (Feist, Rilo Kiley, Bahamas, Peach Pit), the fourteen-track album is honest and full of heart, even as it breaks.
Ace builds off of the success of Revealer (2022), a darkly funny portrait of an artist that won Cunningham her GRAMMY for “Best Folk Album,” but it is a different record. A slow burn until it wasn’t. It follows a period of writer's block. On Revealer and her debut album Who Are You Now (2019), Cunningham says that she was writing songs about heartbreak, but they weren’t about her heartbreak. They were sketches, observations. Cunningham wanted Ace to be emotions first. Heartbreaking and lush and bold. Cunningham’s first single from Ace, “My Full Name,” was released to praise by PASTE who calls the lyrics, “simultaneously sprawling and intimate,” recalling “an ancient work of poetry.” On Ace, which Cunningham serves as co-producer, she wanted piano to move into the foreground. “I wanted it to feel like a mountain peak,” says Cunningham, “I wanted Ace to feel like a mountain we built together.” Ace is a record that feels alive and lush in all the ways Cunningham hoped for when she started writing. It is a record of mastery and honesty. Cunningham loves every single song on it. You can tell.
Drop the needle on Julia Cumming’s solo debut Julia and the very first notes you hear are her voice. A clear, and unadorned declaration of stepping out on her own. Within seconds, the frontwoman and bassist for Brooklyn-based Sunflower Bean sings her agency into being, fingers meet the piano keys, striking just the sparest of chords.
The path to finding that voice has taken nearly two decades, two bands, four EP’s, four albums, three labels, and relentless touring to come to fruition. Ever since she was a kid growing up in the East Village, Julia had wanted to be in a band like the Beatles. The trio Sunflower Bean was formed in 2013 with her friends Nick Kivlen on guitar and Olive Faber on drums, and Julia as their bassist and lead vocalist. They released their first EP, Show Me Your Seven Secrets in 2015. As the band took off, so did Julia’s other job as a model, and ironically, she began to get asked about starting a solo career. In hindsight, Julia muses, “I think it seemed like the obvious thing, because maybe I appeared flashier, but I always took that as an offense. By suggesting that I should go solo, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of what my religion was, which was bands. And yet, I think deep inside, I knew even then that if the idea came in an original, authentic way, I would do it.”
