Corinne Bailey Rae announces the brand new single, "Erasure"

"Erasure" receives its world premiere today on BBC 6 Music when Mary Anne Hobbs plays it as her ‘Near Future’ track. It will be available on all streaming platforms on 15 September.

Both tracks, alongside the meditative beauty of recent single "Peach Velvet Sky", are taken from her highly anticipated new album Black Rainbows, her first release of new material in seven years.

"Erasure" was inspired by Bailey Rae’s visits to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, where US artist Theaster Gates has curated a wide-ranging collection of troublesome artefacts from Black history.

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“Some of the themes of "Erasure" are concerned with the erasure of black childhood so I wanted it to be unhinged and witchy, allowing broken down collapsed mental health in. How else do you sing, “They put out lit cigarettes/Down your sweet throat/They fed you to the alligators”," she explains.

"I saw scores and scores of postcards of children escaping from alligators, and the threat of children being fed to them. Some plantations were surrounded by alligator swamps. I saw what looked like a small sculpture of a boy with his mouth open sitting on a potty. He looks like a toddler who’s really struggling, crying because he’s trying to use the toilet," she continues.

"As a mother, I feel such a huge connection to this boy that’s not a real boy, but it stands in for many children who are in discomfort and needing the love of a mother. But then I looked closer and realized that the potty detaches, and it was an ashtray. People put out cigarettes into the throat of a child. I thought “What kind of world is this where this piece is made for white amusement?”