Over the past two years, Claire Cronin has kept busy with releasing projects steeped in existential horror—from her most recent collection of unsettling Americana, Big Dread Moon, in 2019 to her self-described “horror memoir” Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God published last year. Now she’s switching gears back to music with another LP through Orindal Records called Bloodless, which we’re getting the title track for today. With the subject matter of the spectral, near-ambient track treading through ideas of escaping one’s body, as Cronin tells it, the song’s recording matched its lyrics about an out-of-body experience.
“This is one of those songs that sort of wrote itself, and after it happened, I was surprised that the message was so intense,” Cronin shares. “Something about it feels primal and ancient to me, kind of like a blues, and the process of recording it was almost hallucinatory. I kept losing and finding the beat—losing my sense of time in the music’s repetition and the heat of the tiny room where I was playing.
“As for what the song is about, it defines ‘bloodless’ as nonhuman—a spirit without mortal pain or needs,” she continues. “In the lyrics, I’m trying to imagine what it’s like to not live in a human body. A lot of the record is about this: wanting to transcend myself and my body and the facts of existence. But in this song, I’m making the statement that we can’t do that. We can’t get out. We’re not bloodless. And we can’t really know what’s going on in the spiritual world, despite what some religious believers say. God’s will—if such a thing exists—is a mystery. We have to keep living despite this. I’m reckoning with these truths.”
Hear the track below.
