Serpentwithfeet our New Discovery

It’s not news that here at WIDE we’ve enthusiastically poked around the latest new wave (pun intended) of black queer artists (both from african descent and from the motherland). In our dutyful poking, our grubby little hands came across Serpentwithfeet, the musical incarnation of Josiah Wise: a colorfully dressing, fear-striking-tattoo flaunting, hippie-turned-goth classically trained Soul singer with a penchant for the dramatic: an inclination which mightn’t be just everyone’s cup of tea, but that strikes very true in that part of the feels where melancholies pour, limerences ring, and self-doubts and loathings creep.

 

With an intro paragraph like that you must be thinking “Gee, this queen must be really dark!” but, oh, nothing could be farthest from it. Indeed, his tracks are laden with a dramatism that feels very theatrical, perhaps from the opera, and minor scales a-plenty, which he’ll often harmonize by multi-tracking his own voice.

Serpentwithfeet our New Discovery

 

But then there’s just that: his voice. A voice of jarred yet undefeated hope. A sweet, soulful delivery reluctant to stop dreaming, envisioning worlds of painful beauty and love. But beauty and love, none the least.

 

It’s easier to make sense of it when looking at his trajectory: raised in a gospel setting and growing up in Philadelphia’s soul scene, where he didn’t feel like an avant-garde approach would fit entirely, he opted for the sudden plot twist and went to New York,  a messy place where the messier and unpolished parts of self could breathe out and mingle.

 

Queer has always been a place for deconstruction and symbolic playfulness, and Wise shows this in the thematic coherence between the body image he projects to the crowd and the music he makes. He is, after all, a black male: on this interview, Serpentwithfeet commented how he thinks of that ethnic and gendered profile as a symbol of violence, one of the many things that he exorcises through his work.

The brilliance of it is that the discontinuity between his looks and his work bring forth the reality and richness of his interior world: there’s nothing there to support any first-glance expectations, as these can only be subverted by the heartfelt, delicate an passionate vocal performances of his music.

 

Serpentwithfeet our New Discovery

 

Hinting further at this gentle and sophisticate inner self of his we find his lyrics, loaded of poetic imagery, reflection, empathy and constantly examining his relationships towards another: be it the weakening of a bond made of gossamer, a lover as hard to grasp as The Four Ethers or the memory of “fucked up things” that each family places upon their children, it is clear that Josiah has looked deeply within himself and others and cast his knowledge in elegant and sagacious words.This was back in 2016, when he released Blisters, his first EP, along the renowned drone and ambient producer Haxan Cloak, who provided the scenery for the singer’s operatic vignettes by sampling orchestral sounds or playing eerie, reverb-dipped synths, with the beat on a trimmed-down set of trip-hoppy drums.

 

As of June 8 of 2018, Serpentwithfeet will be releasing Soil, his debut album, of which he’s already forwarded one track on his Bandcamp. This could be a turning point for his career, making the leap from underground indie gem to full-blown queer pop superstar. So yeah, we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed :3