Madeline Kenney - Kiss From The Balcony *Pre-Order

Release Date Friday 18th July 2025
All pre-orders will be dispatched/made ready for collection on that day.

“My hero’s back,” Madeline Kenney sings on the second track of her newest effort, Kiss from the Balcony.
In a sense, she means herself; made with friends Ben Sloan and Stephen Patota across just a few in-
person studio sessions in Oakland, these tracks represent a culmination of Madeline’s musings on growth
and resilience reaching back years, brought to life through this generative and vibrant collaboration. Close
listeners can hear the breadth of stylistic elements and themes carried through from various eras of her
work, which all come together in a cohesive and timeless record.
In two week-long intensive sessions, the three collaborators grew these nine songs from fragments,
sketches, and seeds. With a background in experimental percussion and sound design, Ben Sloan brings
an electronic sound to Kenney’s writing; Stephen Patota provides ingenious guitar melodies throughout and
grounds the project in acoustic elements. Kiss from the Balcony was originally intended to be an EP, but the
sessions brought forth such fruitful ideation and play that the project was expanded to a full length album. It
sits in Madeline’s discography as a thematic and musical progression that sees her iterate on ideas about
love and explore new sonic motifs through her work with Patota and Sloan.
Much of Kiss from the Balcony is a meditation on modern relationships, a feminist and utterly human
contemplation of power and who holds it. “Hereditary backward leaning,” she describes in ‘Slap,’ of the
female condition; “But no-one ever likes to see the girls break down / So they keep it to the bathroom floor”
she sings in the rapturous opener, ‘Scoop.’ While the songs are shrouded in metaphor, the ubiquity of
heartbreak and resilience decode much of the internal conflict Kenney depicts. The album sees her
recognize the precarity and peculiarity of life and take it by the horns, realizing she controls her own
narrative:

She explores the relationships between joy and suffering, choosing to see them as inseparable, two sides
of a single coin. “It’s never over / When will they love me?” Kenney asks on ‘They Go Wide,’ describing her
positionality both as a woman in relationship and as an indie artist in the modern music industry.
A playful hopefulness pervades the record, providing a sense of revelation in the journey throughout,
Kenney’s radical acceptance of life as it is like a lyrical tongue out at the absurd.
Tracklisting : Side A 1.Scoop 2. I Never 3. Breakdown 4. Slap 5. Cue Side B 6. Semitones 7. Paycheck 8.
They Go Wild 9. All I Need

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