INTRODUCING: CAT CLYDE

Canadian alt-folk songwriter Cat Clyde returns today with her fourth album Mud Blood Bone, a raw, deeply personal record that finds the artist pushing further into the emotional and sonic terrain that has defined her quietly formidable career. Released via Concord Records and produced with Drew Vandenberg, the album blends swampy rockabilly grit with vulnerable folk-rock intensity, drawing on Clyde’s Métis roots and lifelong connection to music as something lived rather than learned. With Mud Blood Bone landing alongside a spring UK and EU tour — including a special in-store performance at London’s Rough Trade Denmark Street — Clyde arrives at a moment of transformation, where movement, reflection and instinct shape a record that feels both restless and revelatory.

The album opens with this almost feral cry of “Where is my love?” — when you look back now, what did you realise you were really searching for while writing Mud Blood Bone?

Making this whole record was medicine for me.  Through these songs I was painting a clearer picture of who I was, and what love meant for me.  I was searching for clarity and a deeper understanding of myself, my needs and who I wanted to show up as in all areas of my life.

You’ve spoken about redefining love through nature and your Métis roots. How did reconnecting with land and ancestry reshape the emotional core of these songs?

The natural world has and will always be a huge inspiration to me. There is so much wisdom available to me when I connect to the natural world.  With travelling and being in cities a lot, I've had to create rituals and carve out time and space to connect with nature and the natural world.  I've been very blessed in the last few years to connect with people who share their love of nature and spirituality with me - which has reminded me of the importance of connecting with these aspects of myself and the land and know that it is imperative to have these experiences if I am going to have a full cup to share my gifts and music with others.

You wrote across trailers, boats and constant travel. How does movement and impermanence feed into the raw, nomadic feeling that runs through the record?

I think being in constant movement can be exhausting at times - in the transition of different realities and realms, but it also inspires me to be constantly fine tuning my rituals to keep myself grounded.  It also helps me to confront feelings of unalignment or disharmony, which I feel wouldn't be as easy for me if I was always staying in one place.  It also helps me to stay present, as things are constantly changing.  Sometimes it's hard to say goodbye and move on to the next thing just when I'm starting to feel comfortable, and sometimes it's hard to be in constant movement, but I have been learning to be more accepting of the longing of wanting things to stay the same, and the longing for things to change.

There’s a powerful arc from oppressive love on “Press Down” to liberation on “Night Eyes.” Did you consciously map that journey, or did the sense of release emerge naturally in the writing?

When I write music, firstly I am bringing something from my internal world that I am trying to make sense of.  I feel a deep and unrelenting need to lay it all out in an attempt to more deeply understand how I feel and who I am.  Once all the songs are recorded and put down - that's when I really see the storyline of it all.  Sometimes I don't understand what a song means to me until years later.. 

Working with Drew Vandenberg and drawing sonic parallels to artists like Big Thief and Angel Olsen, how did you balance vintage grit with the more volatile, emotional textures on this album?

I don't think about genre or how my work is perceived while I am making it.  I know what feels good, I know what sounds good to my ear, I know what I want to express in my words and feel of a song.  I give the song space to let me know what it needs and what it wants to be completed.  I am open to trusting the musicians I play with, and the producer I am working with to see things from different angles and try different paths to see how the song and feel responds.  The feel and final outcome of a record I don't necessarily feel like I have a say of, I am really trying to serve the song as it wants to be expressed, and the bones of the feeling I am trying to express with the words and music I choose.