Jehnny Beth first emerged in public consciousness as the charismatic lead singer and co-writer of UK post-punk band Savages, who received Mercury Prize nominations for their classic two albums, Silence Yourself (2013) and Adore Life (2016). The band has been on a break since 2017, and Jehnny Beth has used the time well, making a handful of live guest appearances with artists including PJ Harvey, The xx, and Anna Calvi, and recording with Gorillaz and The Strokes' Julian Casablancas. With her longtime producer Johnny Hostile, she also recently recorded the soundtrack for XY Chelsea, a documentary about Chelsea Manning released on the duo's own French Pop Noire record label. Additionally, Jehnny Beth hosts a Beats 1 radio program called “Start Making Sense” and has recently debuted a new music TV series for Arte in France called “Echoes with Jehnny Beth.”

But it’s in her solo debut -- To Love Is To Live -- that Jehnny Beth truly steps into - and claims - the spotlight. The album is a sonic tour de force, a dark cinematic meditation on the strange business of being alive. Throughout the record, she explores the deepest reaches of her creative consciousness, wrapped in a whirlwind of sounds, the result of collaborating with producers such as Atticus Ross, Flood, and Johnny Hostile, and songwriters like close friend Romy Madley Croft of The xx. But it was David Bowie that ultimately pushed Jehnny Beth towards starting a debut album in the first place.

“I guess the idea first emerged the night that Bowie died. It was 4am in LA and I played his music in bed until the morning. Now when I look back I realise Black Star had a huge impact on me. It was suddenly clear that we are perishable beings, so I made a silent promise to myself”

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“‘I am naked all the time” is the stark opening lyrics of first song “I Am”. The singer confesses that’s how she has felt all along making the album: “The dark voice opening the album is an altered version of an entity that comes back in different forms throughout the album. It represents a lot of things: the dark side, the unconscious mind, but it is also a supreme being, the heroine, a side that is scary, that wants to get loose, revealing all those layers.”

In accessing those darkest, most uncomfortable parts of herself, Jehnny Beth has created something stunningly cathartic and rich for discourse. “I like the concept of music as a palimpseste, consisting of a succession of veils, that you can lift one by one” she says. “I think the music that lasts for me are those that throw our complexities into our faces, reflecting our fundamental multiplicity, with its lots of contradictions and ambiguities. Because inside each of us is a galaxy of diverse identities, which needs to be recognised”.

From subverting power balances (“I’m The Man”) to highlighting the delicate depths of sexuality (“Flower,” written about a dancer from the pole dancing club Jumbo’s in Los Angeles) to marrying dense textures with stark instrumentation (“The Rooms”), To Love Is To Live sees Jehnny Beth giving her intense vulnerability a glorious voice - musically and lyrically -- like no one else making music today.

Recorded between Los Angeles, London, and Paris, To Love Is To Live is an album built on freedom as its foundation, inviting in old friends from the jazz community to contribute improvisational elements to songs like “The Rooms.” It also relies on the freedom from what Jehnny Beth felt are the traditional trappings of songwriting, which was revealed to her from an unlikely source: Beyoncé.

“I had never been a fan of Beyoncé’s music, but when the album ‘Beyoncé’ came out, it really interested me,” she declares. “There’s a real freedom in the songwriting; it felt like a new kind of pop -- the songs were fragmented which I thought was a real expression of our time. I got interested in this idea of mixing genres, having a song within a song. This album weirdly freed me from the codes of what one can do or cannot do.”

Indeed, on To Love Is To Live, there was no line uncrossed, no sound left unexplored, no theme too existential, revealing an album as eclectic and complicated as its creator with her utterly unique perspective on the world. On “French Countryside,” Jehnny Beth combines a song that touches on a return to her French roots (she left to go abroad in her late teens) while also pondering the inevitably of death. “It was my intention to write a song that felt more vulnerable than anything I had ever written before,” she says. “I wrote the verses on a plane as I was convinced it was going to crash. I was making promises to myself about what I was going to do differently if I survived.”

Which is to say: The album is a tumble through life’s loftiest questions, an album forged from the ambition and courage of an artist putting everything she’s got right there into the music. “From the beginning I wanted to make a record that would give a sense of a journey,” she says. “I wrote this album as if it was the last one I was ever going to write.” Let’s hope it’s not.