Alabaster DePlume sings of agency and survival on forthcoming album, A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole

A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole marks his first major work following 2022’s GOLD and 2020's To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol 1. It also directly follows his EP Cremisan: Prologue To A Blade (recorded in Palestine in summer 2024) and his poetry book Looking for my value: Prologue to a blade.

“A blade, because a blade is whole, it has forgiven itself, and because it will take a small piece of our opposite, for us to be complete," DePlume says. "A blade has marked out these former selves on my hand, a blade made the lines that divine us and the blade is whole. A blade. While I forgive myself, and heal, and lead us in healing. We can only forgive each other once we forgive ourselves. We can only heal each other while we heal ourselves.”

In the video for lead track, “Oh My Actual Days”, — directed by artist Rebecca Salvadori, who also shot the album cover — DePlume, bathed in blue light, is pensive as he recounts past self-conceptions and strives towards internal acceptance and, ultimately, healing.

About the instrumental song, whose title “Oh My Actual Days” refers to a London colloquialism that can be translated into American English as “oh my f-ing god,” DePlume says: “We can, if we choose, read this phrase as a call to the divinity of the moment we are in. Wherever we are, whatever is happening, it is our own life – a life that is made up of the time (the days – the actual days) that we spend. And we call to this – the only real thing that we have. Our time. Whatever we are experiencing it belongs to us, it is the ‘actual’ moment we are in. And it is divine. This is the introduction to the album.”