Some records arrive politely. We Swallowed The Sky, the sophomore album from LA-based singer-songwriter Beatrix (a.k.a. Arielle Kasnetz), is not one of those records. Out today via Nice Life Recording Company, it’s a haunted, gorgeously arranged reckoning with a long-gone relationship and all the ghosts it left behind — a record that doesn’t just revisit the past, it lets the past sit down at the table and order a drink.

A classically trained vocalist and pianist who only started writing her own songs during the pandemic, Kasnetz has spent the last few years figuring out what her voice actually sounds like when it isn’t reciting someone else’s story. The answer, it turns out, is striking: off-kilter melodies, chamber-pop swells, indie rock teeth, and a folk songwriter’s eye for the details that wreck you.

She didn’t get there alone. We Swallowed The Sky was co-produced by Philip Etherington and Ehren Ebbage, with a supporting cast that reads like a fantasy-league lineup of modern American music: guitarists Harrison Whitford (Phoebe Bridgers) and Ryan Lerman (John Legend, Vulfpeck), bassist Sean Hurley (John Mayer), drummer Rob Humphries (Kacey Musgraves), pianist Zac Rae (Death Cab For Cutie, Fiona Apple), pedal steel legend Greg Leisz (Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell), horn player CJ Camerieri (Bon Iver, Sufjan Stevens), woodwinds player Jesse Chandler (Midlake), and string arranger Rob Moose (Taylor Swift, Sufjan Stevens, Jay-Z). Leisz’s pedal steel, Kasnetz says, functions as the literal ghost on the record — “the thing that takes you somewhere between the past and the future that isn’t the present.”

The album opens with the eerie, Carrie & Lowell-tinged “Ghosts of Tennessee,” then unfurls into a loose trilogy that forms its emotional spine: the rock-and-roll exorcism of “Dead Dog,” the storytelling sharpness of “Class Reunion,” and the breezy, Americana-leaning “Upstate,” where the ex is still ruminating ten years later. Elsewhere, “Hole To China” is a piano-and-strings heartbreaker about a Catskills cabin lost to divorce, and closer “My Angel” is a slow-burning, lightning-in-a-bottle moment recorded in a single, barely-touched take.

To celebrate the release, Beatrix is also dropping a self-directed official video for “Upstate” today at 9am PT — a top-down, winding-road counterpoint to a day where everything is going wrong. It’s the carefree exhale at the heart of an otherwise ghost-haunted record.

Beatrix plays a record release show tonight at Healing Force of the Universe in Los Angeles, with John Lowell Anderson opening. The show follows her recently wrapped debut tour supporting Cece Coakley.

Watch the official video for “Upstate” here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Beatrix+Upstate+official+video

We Swallowed The Sky is out now everywhere you stream music. Press play, draw the curtains, and let it haunt you properly.