Anastasia Coope signs to Jagjaguwar and announces debut album, Darning Woman

While staying at a relative’s vacant home, Coope began experimenting with recording software in an empty living room, singing directly into the open space. Until that point, she had mainly thought of herself as a visual artist, but immediately, it felt right. Throughout the next year, she taught herself to sing in different styles, hocketing and layering her voice to construct vast, sweeping choirs. “I was able to envision a room of things happening, rather than me just building something,” Coope says. “This record was me starting to think spatially about music.”

Her songwriting revolved around intuition and aesthetics, rather than precise lyrical storytelling. Throughout Darning Woman, Coope invokes a sense of movement through the use of makeshift mantras: the word “woman” appears repeatedly throughout the album’s song titles. For Coope, it was an unconscious motif. “On this album, the word ‘woman’ represents the idea of a muse, or an idol, or an icon,” she says. “It was a mixture of the maternal with the idea of a character, a star.”