Madeline Kenney

Putting a dreamy sheen on layered indie rock textures, Bay Area singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Madeline Kenney crafts pieces that register as much like compositions as conventional songs. After surfacing with her earliest recordings in 2016, she joined forces with Toro y Moi for projects by both artists before refining a quietly expansive, experimental style alongside Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner for the 2018 release Perfect Shapes and the 2020 album Sucker's Lunch. Serving simultaneously as a pandemic and breakup record, the 2023 effort A New Reality Mind proved every bit as detailed as those that preceded it, even though Kenney tracked it solo in her basement.

Raised in Seattle, Madeline Kenney began piano instruction at age five and soon started composing her own material. During her teenage years she took up professional baking while completing a neuroscience degree, then relocated to the Bay Area in 2014. Although the move was intended to advance her baking career, she quickly immersed herself in the regional arts scene, participating in modern dance and painting while resuming songwriting. She supported herself through nannying and teaching voice and piano, launched a modest record label, and acquired engineering and production skills via the Women’s Audio Mission in San Francisco.

Her debut EP, Signals, appeared on Chaz Bear’s Company Records in 2016, with Bear handling production and Kenney supplying the arrangements. She next featured on Toro y Moi’s July 2017 album Boo Boo, after which Bear produced her first full-length, Night Night at the First Landing, issued on Company Records that September.

Working again with newly met collaborator Jenn Wasner—who, like Kenney, performed on multiple instruments—her more exploratory second album, Perfect Shapes, arrived in 2018 on Carpark Records under Wasner’s production. Wasner rejoined Kenney, along with Wye Oak’s Andy Stack, for the 2020 follow-up Sucker's Lunch. Extending the densely layered, reverb-rich synth-rock approach of those earlier works, July 2023’s A New Reality Mind was nonetheless self-produced and recorded by Kenney alone in her basement. Shaped by early-pandemic isolation and an abrupt breakup, its restless origins surfaced more clearly in the lyrics and electronic elements than in the overall dreamy, midtempo atmosphere.