Grace Cummings is stepping further into the dark. The Australian indie favorite has released “My God,” the first single from her upcoming fourth album, ‘Bloodhorse!,’ announced today for August 14th on ATO Records.
Cummings spent years quietly building a following in her native Australia with a run of impressive releases. Her profile went global when her third album, ‘Ramona,’ drew widespread critical acclaim in 2024. Like that record, ‘Bloodhorse!’ was recorded in Topanga Canyon, California with GRAMMY-nominated producer Jonathan Wilson, whose credits include Father John Misty, Angel Olsen and Margo Price.
“My God” arrives with a homespun video from director Ben Portnoy. The song is a haunting piano piece built around Cummings’ deep, breathy vocals, which she recorded while suffering from pneumonia. “Lyrically, this song is about hatred, jealousy, rage,” she says, describing the title’s God as the dark forces of the modern world, the toxic energy we scroll through and the fear we feed it every day.
Wilson, recently nominated for a GRAMMY for his work on Father John Misty’s ‘Chloe and the Next 20th Century,’ doesn’t hold back in his praise. He calls Cummings a once-in-a-generation voice and says her songwriting keeps getting sharper, adding that she delivers the new album with humanity, power and emotion like no one else on earth.
The title carries its own weight of meaning. Cummings explains that a bloodhorse is a horse bred to win, though one that’s often temperamental, fearful and easily broken. She compares the feeling to a trapped animal twitching in the starting gate, then bolting the moment she opens her eyes.
Fight or flight powers the record from end to end. ‘Bloodhorse!’ moves through anxieties, confessionals, hopes and nightmares, swooping from gorgeous to grotesque, velvet to violent, sacred to profane. If ‘Ramona’ widened her world from folk into something cinematic, this album drives deep into the night with the headlights off.
“In the past few years I’ve gone through one of the biggest personal changes of my life,” Cummings says. She frames ‘Bloodhorse!’ as an attempt to express the things she can’t say, a confession and an act of courage made for no one but herself, representing not the way life is but the way it feels.
Those feelings run large. Themes of life, death, agency, abuse and self-examination pulse through the lyrics, carried by shuddering synths, tense strings and woozy grooves that meet Cummings’ gift for campfire melodies, expressive piano and that soulful voice. The thrill comes from hearing her push at the edge of her own understanding.