Sarah Grace White

Los Angeles musician Sarah Grace White announces her new EP, Sinkhole, out June 28th, and releases the new single/video, “Light.”  The stories of White’s songs wrestle with the isolation of observing one’s own life: the sacredness in the mundane. Each song zooms in on a moment or a detail and has a way of expanding outward –  a piece of glass, a knife, a first date, a satellite turning into the spacial, mountainous processings of love and of heartbreak. She’s a storyteller with a range evoking a compelling duality, the way that daybreak can look the same as sunset. Her voice oscillates between softness and edge, a vast and soulful spectrum. Throughout this new EP, co-produced with Jorge Balbi, White’s textural voice is layered over consistent, grounded rhythm, reflecting the unreliable tint of memory.

Sinkhole offers a song for each mood. The previously released title track “Sinkhole,” praised by UPROXX as “a gentle, brooding tune rooted in the melancholia of artists like The Weather Station and Angel Olsen,” asks the cosmic, universal question of synchronicity – could it be while I’m thinking of you, you’re thinking of me too? The chorus lilts with hope and desperation – “Somewhere out in black space / There is a mountain shrouded in green / Where the lovers think of each other / At the same time.” New single “Light” is a one-sided conversation through endless elements, begging for grace. “The first few weeks into falling in love has a way of putting your life under a microscope,” White reflects. “Every detail buzzes, every element flickers, every word examined under the lens of possibility. I wrote ‘Light’ at my kitchen table with a drum machine in this state of mind.”

The music video for “Light,” directed by Emilie Wilde, uses abstract visuals and in-camera effects to transport us into White’s world. “The concept for the ‘Light’ video is built on the performance of self-imposed isolation – who you become when you’re disconnected from everyone and yet locked into the space around you,” Wilde explains. “I wanted to take advantage of Sarah’s ability to be comfortable being weird. She brings an innocence to the performance that’s really refreshing.”

Coming from a musical family, White always sang. This led to school choirs, then bands, and even a stint of Bulgarian throat singing. In high school, she was enamored with a kind of physical and visceral theater and went off to study drama, not really knowing what she wanted to do with her life, but knowing she needed to perform. She began to pursue acting, but found a dissonance between the art she wanted to make and the kind of workforce she began to enter. “I didn’t feel good at the entire environment of it, but I wanted to create, and I knew I needed to find my own way in.” Throughout this exploration, White was simultaneously, though secretly, exploring music – writing in her room, singing in the car, jotting down lyrics and phrases at odd moments, but afraid to commit to music publicly. Music kept gnawing at White until a natural breaking point – “the need overcame the fear and it felt harder to ignore it than to just do it.” White’s best friend gave her an ultimatum just a couple years back – sing or stop talking about it. 

White chose to sing. She took a handful of songs to friend Jorge Balbi, a pro drummer (best known for his role in Sharon Van Etten’s band) and mixer but never a full producer for another artist. Both having a penchant for cathartic soundscapes, the two spent weeks compiling sounds and inspirations – The Durutti Column, Talk Talk, Kate Bush, The Blue Nile, New Order, and newer artists like The Weather Station and Westerman, “music where you can hear the negative space, and you feel it in your whole body” – before starting work on White’s debut EP, 2023’s  Are You Here This Time. That EP unraveled itself through intricate, gentle catharsis, working through moments of quiet explosion – anthems circling questions of self-ownership, exuberance, and devastation. A US tour supporting Dehd and packed shows in Los Angeles and New York City followed.

White enjoys “the celebration and shame in finding depth in something small.” She does this so dexterously that the elements she presents converge, combine, dissolve – the inertia of them rushing down the drain, leaving us clean – “each of these songs were written from subconscious morning reflections of the night before – sitting in my sunlit kitchen, visited by flashes of touch, smells of must and alcohol, conversations misconstrued, mistakes, precious wins.” While Are You Here This Time crashed forward with excitement, Sinkhole highlights White as a striking new voice, an artist on the precipice of self-ownership – ready, free and present.