Singer-songwriter Shilpa Ray has announced her new album titled, Portrait Of A Lady. The New York punk rock/art pop music artist announced that the LP is set to be released on April 29 via Northern Spy. 

The artist has created her most searing and personal album so far. Portrait Of A Lady was written in the wake of the #metoo movement and the years of the Trump Administration, Ray uses the album to process her own experiences with abuse, layering autobiographical detail with ferocious bon mots and surrealistic rock and roll. 

Portrait Of A Lady will feature singles like “Manic Pixie Dream Cunt”, the hard-charging “Bootlickers of the Patriarchy” and “Heteronormative Horseshit Blues”, which was released in October 2020. Known for using different sounds and tapping into different genres, Ray’s album extracts from a stylistic palette of synths, electronic beats and hard rock guitars. All of which is inspired by legendary artists, such as Ministry, Billy Idol, Pat Benetar.

The inspiration for Portrait Of A Lady comes from Ray’s experience with photos from Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, which is a personal expose of the photographer’s time in the No Wave scene of New York in the late 1970s. Ray states, “It shook me to my core and made me reflect on my own experiences with sexual assault and abuse.” Although she hesitated to make a concept album about being a survivor, Ray decided to go through with it. She says, “I kept asking, ‘How do you do this?'” With the personal and fearless lyrics on the album, Ray and her co-producer/collaborator Jeff Berner gathered a huge selection of sounds. Ray says, “No survivor has a set way of dealing with what they had to survive. There’s no homogenized experience or interpretation of it.” 

Portrait of a Lady tracklisting 

1. Straight Man’s Dream
2. Manic Pixie Dream Cunt
3. Heteronormative Horseshit Blues
4. No
5. Lawsuits and Suicide
6. Cry For The Cameras
7. Bootlickers Of the Patriarchy
8. Male Feminist
9. Same Sociopath
10. Charm School For Damaged Boys
11. Two Faced Lovers
12. Last Wave