“Once a song has left my body it no longer belongs to me, it never really did. I am simply a vessel,” says Clay, who far from using metaphors or complex discourses to explain the message behind her new single Artery, makes use of the song’s lyrics – and its striking meaning – to communicate with her listeners. This is the first offering from her approaching project, Breathing Into Bloom, a follow up to her 2019 Hues EP. A work in which intimacy and the transformation of suffering into melodies that make our feelings come to the surface are paramount. The artist practices what she calls “radical vulnerability.”

The pursuit of inner peace is another constant in her music. She is not afraid to approach painful experiences that are far from the utopia in which her sound could immerse us at first. A duality in which the inner world embraces the external projection, transforming wounds into antidotes to heal. “I love when I am able to capture that because it actually makes the pain of the lyrics and song itself more bearable,” adds Clay, whose new single Artery was produced by Yakob, Alissia Benveniste and Loshendrix.