Neko Case with Destroyer

Neko Case is the consummate career artist, with a fierce work ethic and a constant drive to search deeper within herself for creative growth. Rolling Stone calls her “one of America’s best and most ambitious songwriters.”

In 2018, Case released her latest album, Hell-On, five years after her last solo project, The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You. In the interim, she sang on Whiteout Conditions, the 2017 release from longtime bandmates the New Pornographers. The year before that, she released a vinyl box set of her solo work and joined k.d. Lang and Laura Veirs on the case / lang / veirs project.

She was hell-bent on not losing sight of the goal, reminding herself there was still beauty in the world and in the process of making music. She decided to climb inside her role as producer and wield it more directly. It just meant owning what she was already doing.

The record that came out of this reckoning delivers both familiar Neko Case and something different. Death, extinction, exploitation, tides, animals and adoration all blend recognizably. Case's trademark narrative gaps, just large enough for listeners to enter each song, likewise remain.

As with previous albums, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood and Middle Cyclone, Hell-On spins away from conventions of story, slipping into real life, with its fierce mess and blind catastrophes.

“I’m writing fairy tales, and I hear my life story in them, but they’re not about me,” Case says. “I still can’t figure out how to describe it. But I think that’s why we make music or write things. You’ve got to invent a new language. ”