MAVI announced his third album, Shadowbox, due out on August 9. It’s the follow-up to 2022’s great Laughing So Hard It Hurts, and about it, he writes, “I was really sad about the last album. I didn’t really know how to get back into making stuff into the way I like. I felt really hopeless about it, started getting really drunk, dealt with love and heartbreak, having to be there for my family. I had to come back and really learn how to make art all over again. My path back was centered around visual art, fashion, interior design, and design as an artistic framework and as an organizational force in society. A lot of the backbone of the album came from my time with this design book, The Black Experience in Design. The idea I gained from that is design is power. The ability to determine the order of things, the way things are supposed to be…that’s power. The orderliness in the lives of the devoutly religious became an attractive subtext during the creation of this album.”
The first single is the raw, autobiographical “Drunk Prayer,” and you can watch the video, which MAVI directed with Jesse Fox Hallen, below.
MAVI has also announced a Shadowbox tour, which runs through the fall and has him supported by MESSIAH!, Malaya, Pink Siifu, Ovrkast., Chenayder, Vayda, Sideshow, Niontay, Igwe Aka, and Ahmir, varying by show.
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