Adia Victoria - Silences

The Guardian 80

(Atlantic)

Adia Victoria, based in Nashville, has been insistent that the music she makes is the blues: not Americana, or indie rock, or any of the other styles that she might be pigeonholed into. It’s not blues in the sense of adopting the 12-bar shuffle, more that it draws on the themes that have affected her as a woman of colour in the south: race, religion (she was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church), powerlessness and oppression. Silences, her second album, traces those ideas through the story of one woman experiencing them, though – as with most themed albums – you wouldn’t necessarily know that unless you’d been told.

Pitchfork 77

Even if the second album from this Nashville singer doesn’t sound like the blues, she embodies the spirit, squaring up to her demons without fear.