Madeline Kenney
Kiss From the Balcony
CARPARK
When you read the title of Oakland-based songwriter Madeline Kenney’s latest album, Kiss From the Balcony, it’s hard not to think of one kiss in particular. You know the one—star-crossed, ill-fated, impractical, and ending quite poorly for all involved. Like that famous scene in which young lovers profess and gush, the air around Kenney’s album is thick with a kind of hopeful yearning: a desire to be needed and a need to desire. And yet, unlike those lovers, Kenney is also keenly aware of the audience, that unseen mass of eyeballs, and how perspective can shift things around seamlessly and without warning.
It’s this idea that Kenney returns to again and again throughout her fifth record. On “Slap,” she sings in her sultry, understated way among sputtering, layered production of someone changing the camera angle just as things are coming into focus. The idea of some hovering eye in the sky appears again on “Semitones,” this time accompanied by the perspective of her lover, who takes her in while letting his eyes meander suggestively toward their bed, as if attempting to guide her viewpoint toward his own. Kenney seems to both revel in being seen and hold a healthy amount of skepticism toward the seer, wrestling with how much credence to give either feeling.
Elsewhere, the shifts have less to do with perspective than with power, and how the push and pull all but defines love, adoration, and creativity. “I kinda like the wall around me, and I kinda wanna beg to break it,” sings Kenney on “Slap,” attempting to live in this contradiction if just for a moment. On “Scoop” she sings not of living within walls but of building them and embracing the cool detachment that can often give one the upper hand. Perhaps the most literal song in the collection, “Paycheck,” reflects how this idea extends to her professional life, which takes an appropriately vicious viewpoint of those mining these kinds of revelations for their own profit. Still, even in this moment, Kenney seems at odds with not only how much control she has, but how much she might want and how much that can ultimately come to shape her image to herself and to others.
Where previously Kenney has worked closely with Toro y Moi and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner, she’s since found comfort in doing things on her own. Though there are a few key collaborators here, A Kiss From the Balcony is very much an extension of her last self-produced record, 2023’s A New Reality Mind. This is an album built on an echoed Plinko board of synth and guitar, sounds that seem to swirl around Kenney’s vocals as if with a mind of their own. To hear Kenney tell it, the record was originally meant to be an EP, but grew new life as the recording process continued. There are times when you can feel this strain in songs that feel too much like sketches, ideas that come sputtering to a halt rather than crescendo—but even this is more nitpick than sweeping judgement, a perspective among many, constantly shifting.
