070Shake

About 070Shake:

You can’t put 070Shake into a box. The artist born Danielle Balbuena makes renegade anthems that exhibit her ever-shifting, experimental spirit, while maintaining a glowing core of pure emotion. Since her breakout in 2018, she established her chameleonic presence across the worlds of rap, R&B, alternative, and pop through two ambitious studio albums: 2020’s Modus Vivendi and 2022’s You Can’t Kill Me. Now, she readies Petrichor, her third album and most daring, fully fleshed out statement yet, arriving November 15.

The title Petrichor refers to the earthy scent that accompanies a rainfall—one of Shake’s favorite scents after her mother always pointed it out to her while growing up. “It brings me to this part of myself where I feel oneness with everything that I’ve ever been through, every age that I’ve ever been,” Shake says of the smell. She’s contributed piercing hooks to tracks by Kanye West, Nas, and Pusha T, and scored a UK No. 1 hit with her RAYE collaboration, “Escapism.” But Petrichor is Shake’s true original statement, bringing together fractured facets of Shake’s life and spirit, and weaves it all into a heroic tale.

Petrichor displays Shake’s most adventurous and far-reaching compositions to date, as she embarks on a search for salvation while battling the vices of the world and the inner turmoil of her mind. Opener “Sin” plunges the listener into this twisted universe: “Let’s go to Sin City/I ain’t talkin’ Las Vegas/…I don’t care how lost we get,” she sings over menacing synths. The LP then sees Shake falling deep into an irreversible romance to which she must fully surrender. The album portrays this odyssey by careening through psychedelic guitars, nocturnal dance beats, melodramatic piano, classic rock-inspired melodies, and soul-bearing lyricism.

“It starts with ‘Sin,’ which represents where I was at the time. But then the project says: ‘Let’s go through this darkness together and make it out the other side,’” Shake explains of the album executive produced in partnership with her longstanding collaborator Dave Hamelin. “It finishes with ‘Love,’ and everything in-between was the journey. As long as you realize in the end that everything is love, then you can appreciate the road you took to get there.”

Shake attributes the album’s unpredictable sound to the way that she lets songs “lead her” in the creation process. “It feels like I’m channeling something when I’m recording,” she explains. “I’m waiting until I find this thing that’s searching for me, and I’m not satisfied until what I hear in my head is manifested in the music. I think it’s also my ADHD—when I hear a song going a certain way for too long I just have to take it somewhere else.” Or on “Elephant,” a song about having her first fight with a lover on a rowdy night out, Shake ended up keeping unconventional chord switches that were originally a “mistake” in the studio. “A lot of times, people have to be careful with making mistakes around me because I end up liking it more,” she laughs.

A wide range of guests lend their voices to Petrichor’s epic narrative, including Courtney Love on Shake’s cover of the 1970 Tim Buckley song “Song to the Siren,” JT of City Girls on the mystical track “Into Your Garden,” and Nashville singer-songwriter Cam on the euphoric “Never Let Us Fade.” Lily-Rose Depp appears on the emotionally charged “Blood On Your Hands,” on which Shake recites a spoken-word passage of devotion to a “fatal lover.” Then Depp enters, reading aloud from a letter she had originally written to Shake that begins with the words: “I cannot begin to untangle myself from you.”

Depp also appears as a muse in the music video for “Winter Baby / New Jersey Blues,” a song that honors Shake’s present and past; the track’s first half was inspired by her current home of southern California and 1950s surf rock, while the second half is an homage to her New Jersey upbringing where she “paid her dues.” Bridging these worlds is Shake’s greaser character in the video, inspired by S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age drama The Outsiders. Other visual inspirations for the album include Ingmar Berman’s 1966 psychological drama Persona and Sergei Parajnov’s 1969 poetic classic The Color of Pomegranates.

As she strips back the Auto-Tune and focuses on delivering rawness and vulnerability—while being more exploratory than ever before—Shake finds her true self on Petrichor. “Right now, I’m rediscovering my voice and becoming one with it,” she says.