By way of South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Michigan, Illinois and Louisiana, Katrina Ford eventually found her home as an artist in Baltimore two decades ago when she co-founded the bands Love Life, Celebration, and Mt. Royal, not to mention contributing vocals to an EP from hometown indie heroes Future Islands in 2010. With additional credits recording and performing with TV on the Radio and UNKLE, she’s established herself well beyond the city limits over the years, culminating in a pivot to solo recordings in 2022. Today we get another sparkling indie-pop track from her called “Dundalk Dungeon,” which serves as an ode to the geography of her adopted hometown. “It kinda tastes to me like the juice from ’80s pop ballads somehow spiked a punch bowl of the ’80s underground,” Ford notes of the track, which additionally boasts some of the heartland-rock influence of her contemporaries in The War on Drugs.
“Sean [Antanaitis] and I set up a drum loop, he wrote the main synth line, and I just started lightheartedly silly-riffing on the landscape of Dundalk and the interior of the Dungeon, visualizing ultraviolet lighting, aging strippers, and OTB with a cold one,” she continues, explaining how the song was conceived last summer. “When I first moved to Baltimore, I was astonished by the richness of the underground bar culture known as ‘secret bars’—sometimes in peoples' basement or behind hidden doors. This song is a lighthearted homage to these places and to the landscape of the Baltimore Harbor… When we wrote this, little did we know what awaited: Tragically, on March 26 this year, Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed when a container ship struck one of its piers, killing six construction workers.”
Along with the track, Ford created a collage-like video featuring a cut-out image of a Monte Carlo being “taunted” by bats, spiders, and snakes. “I wanted to make—for lack of better description—a little living neoclassical junk totem,” she explains. “A pastel soft and scary theater grotesque in freefall. And despite the fear of heights, bats, snakes, spiders...all safely landing in Dundalk Terminal 2023.”
Check it out below.
