Julia Shapiro of Chastity Belt, Childbirth and Who Is She? has announced the release of her new solo album, Zorked, out on October 15th via Suicide Squeeze Records. Today, she has also shared the first single and video from the album, “Come With Me“.
Speaking about the video, director Ertugrul Yaka said: “Julia found me on one of the freelancer sites. It came as a surprise to me because I’ve been listening to Chastity Belt since 2016. So I know her from the Chastity Belt. It was a great experience for me. The video is about the war between good trips and bad trips. When you’re looking for joy, two kinds of feelings are always chasing you at the end. When you reach joy, a piece from your inside breaks off; I mean, it’s giving you something and taking another thing from your inside. I made this video based on my own experience.”
Listen to “Come With Me” and watch the video for it below:
Zorked (adj.) – what happens when you end up thunderbaked, as in extremely stoned–or in any situation where you feel not sober. You can feel so tired you’re zorked. In fact, any state, so long as you’re a little out of it, qualifies. And Julia Shapiro, of Chastity Belt, Childbirth, and Who Is She?, much like everyone on this earth with a pulse, was zorked on more than one occasion in 2020. In March, she packed up her things and traded Seattle’s late-winter gloom for the perennial sunshine and seemingly endless opportunity of Los Angeles–only to be forced into near-total isolation. “I know everyone had a feeling of lost identity, but for me, it was even more extreme. I had no friends. I was alone. I asked myself, ‘Why am I here?’ Just every day: ‘why am I here?’”
With nowhere to go and nothing to do, her new songs started to take shape. On her second album under her own name Zorked, Julia’s Los Angeles is a wasteland melting in slow-motion, a place to commune with ghosts and warped legacies. As she puts it: “It takes you on a wild ride. There’s weird shit in it.” Living within earshot of a man who spent his entire 2020 singing karaoke for over 10 hours a day, Julia could write, record, and play an album’s worth of instruments without fear of noise complaints. Her roommate Melina Duterte (Jay Som) had transformed their house into a viable home studio, making it easy to fully realise the sound in her head, even at the height of a global lockdown.
Zorked artwork & tracklist:
1. Death (XIII)
2. Come With Me
3. Wrong Time
4. Someone
5. Reptile! Reptile!
6. Pure Bliss
7. Hellscape
8. Do Nothing About It
9. Zorked
10. Hall of Mirrors