WE WERE MADE PREY. is Kathryn Joseph's most entrancing album

That said, compared to previous outings, her voice is more nuanced. Lyrically, she’s more image-heavy, crafting metaphors that accentuate the savage aspects of human life. Producer Lomond Campbell, who steered 2022’s for you who are the wronged, plays a key role, facilitating soundscapes that oscillate between the earthy and celestial, the austere and noisy. The result is Joseph’s most entrancing release, a project that puts her Hobbesian vision and poetic leanings on full and unadulterated display.

At the heart of the project is conflict: conflict between living things and, more pressingly, conflict within the self. On the opening track, Joseph laments, “I am wolf and you’re full of blood”. Later, she adds, “You are safe only when I’m gone”, highlighting the incongruity between desire and conscience. The music is eerily hollow, rustily metallic. Joseph’s voice is at once fragile and confident, equanimous and mercurial.

A gossamer vocal on “Dark” is vividly contrasted with distorted chords that gradually fray, conjuring severed power lines sparking in a black night. Built around a melancholy piano sequence, “Deer” captures potent paradoxes: a stark atmosphere coupled with Joseph’s steamy vocal, a flurry of accents and string sounds washing over snapshots of a postlapsarian world (“Burn my body of blood and water and wine”).

While much of Joseph’s work, starting with her debut, 2015’s bones you have thrown me and blood i’ve spilled, unfolds sans percussion, she’s made strategic use of beats throughout her oeuvre. “Here lies the lightkeeper / she is dead”, Joseph sings on the rhythmic “Harbour”, her voice complemented by staccato snares, droney undertones, and trebly overlays. The piece evokes otherworldliness and various dream states, as Joseph interweaves hope and despair.

“Roadkill” is catchily rhythmic, as well, driven not by percussion but rather a simple yet engaging guitar part (that blossoms into a fuzz-scape). Jessica Pratt’s recent work comes to mind, though Joseph is more anchored in the archetypal and a survival-of-the-fittest brand of Darwinism. Comparisons to Nicole Dollanganger also arise, though while Dollanganger is fascinated with true crime and the American fringe, Joseph is less circumstantially focused, more attuned to the energetics of dominance and submission.

One final comparison: writer Philip K. Dick (A Scanner Darkly, “Minority Report”, The Man in the High Castle). He and Joseph share a bleak vision: humans are engaged in an adversarial set-up with themselves, each other, and the environment (terrestrial and beyond). Dick views this conspiratorially, however, while Joseph views it as a product of biology, conditioning, and history. In Dick’s world, life unfolds in a secretly autocratic universe; in Joseph’s, scarcity of materials, love, and belonging is a spiritual truth, which makes competition; i.e., conflict, the unavoidable reality.

“I called and you didn't come”, Joseph laments on closer “Fire”, addressing the unreliability of relationships, including the one offered by religion (to a Higher Power). While her voice is perhaps at its more relaxed, conveying a sense of resolve (or is that resignation?), her final line (“I am a wolf now so I have to go”) points to a succumbing, a reluctant embracing of “lower” or id-driven instincts. The law of the so-called jungle prevails.

With We Were Made Prey, Joseph finds her technical and emotional stride. Her lyrics are impressionistic, if not abstract; channeled through her expressive voice via subtle melodic movements, however, they become accessible, taking on a mystical allure. Joseph is adeptly complemented by Campbell’s contributions, which draw out the understated volatility of her songs and delivery. Together, they’ve forged her “actualization” project, Joseph wrestling with the evolutionary, karmic, and cosmic designs we can’t seem to escape.