Sarah Kinsley’s Ascension is one of the most musically explorative and conceptually innovative albums I’ve listened to in recent years. Kinsley has the unique ability to merge haunting introspective lyricism with dynamic, invigorating soundscaping and instrumentation that makes audiences simultaneously want to dance, and lie down in a magical garden and reflect on years passed.
Sarah Kinsley is an American alt-pop indie singer songwriter born in California and trained in classical piano and violin while moving between the Sunshine State, Connecticut and Singapore. Later in life Kinsley continued studying music theory at Columbia before her music career hit off with the release of her viral song The King. Acting as both musician and producer, Kinsley combines her classical background with contemporary pop styles to create extraordinarily intricate, sprawling tracks, and her 2023 EP Ascension is a collection of such songs.
“Ascension is about this unknown, ethereal place—the islands we create with people we have loved, where our phrases with them live, where our conversations outlast us, where every moment we have experienced lives again and again. It’s an eternal paradise,” she explains.
The idea of Ascension being a collection of ephemeral moments that are built to last an eternity is certainly an idea that shines through the record. Each of the five tracks (Oh No Darling!, Black Horse, Ascension, Lovegod and Sliver of Time) captures the feeling of bittersweet nostalgia. Memories here feel like sand falling through your fingers no matter how hard you try to hold on, and the EP captures the holding on so elegantly. “I was a child for a minute,” Kinsley reminisces in a languid melancholy on the first line of the opening track, introducing us to a project that, in its purest essence, is a “collection of shining memories [to] ascend to.”
The project itself feels like it was drawn from a liminal space between the fading ebbs of adolescence and a hazy, looming presence of adulthood. And this is clearest seen on her song Black Horse. As Kinsley explains in an interview, the black horse is traditionally symbolic of death, or simply letting go: “the horse signifies letting things which no longer serve us to die. Death as a case for renewal, as a symbol for beginning once again. As a symbol for perseverance, for shedding obstacles, for pressing ahead.” She reimagines this symbolism to explore the tension between holding on the past and moving into the future. “Are we still too young/ are we still too young,” she asks again and again with bleeding vocals over a lively drum beat.
Simultaneously, Kinsley meditates on the nature of time and love: how hope, love, presence and childhood are gorgeous flashes in the lineation of time. The first four songs detail the experiences that create moments in time, and the last a eulogy to the past and a peaceful reflection on brevity itself.
Her opening track Oh No Darling! is an affectionate and ironic contemplation on childhood love, with Kinsley reflecting on how she would fall in love for the thrill, “I was kissing you, just to feel the air,” and “there she goes, running with her head/ for the sake of living on the edge,” capturing childhood innocence and first loves.
Youthful naivety gives way slowly to the necessity of release on Black Horse, where expansive, desperate vocals enhance the vulnerability and defiance of youth and the exhilarating feeling of transitioning between stages of life.
This tension is ultimately resolved in Ascension, the emotional heart of the EP, in which Kinsley creates a space where her memory becomes immortal: “and I die to stay here/ I can still taste the memory of you on my tongue.” Even here, however, beauty is fragile, and the song fractures into a brief state of existential vulnerability. “Am I a dream, or is this how it will end?,” Kinsley laments, grounding the otherwise ethereal and almost fantasy-inspired album in a moment of acute clarity.
But these questions don’t yet resolve. Before they do Kinsley makes one last song, cleverly titled Lovegod, wherein she plays on religious imagery to articulate the yearning to experience totalising love, even if it’s painful or experienced with someone undeserving.
Then, finally, her journey ends with Sliver of Time.
In this last song, she embodies the motif of a clock with her title, and the steady ticking beat while drawing on her exploration of adolescence, memory and relationships to conclude on a meditative note: “Maybe the feeling disappears in it, but for one night and one night only, you can say you knew me, you held me like this.”
In the last five years Sarah Kinsley has become an artist to watch.
As one of the few female producers in the music industry she challenges the status quo, creates sound in beautiful, creative ways like sampling with a glass cup (yes, that’s a true story) and creates deeply introspective music without compromising upbeat soundscaping. But I think her biggest talent is her literary instinct combined with her ear for sound.
Her amazing capacity to combine both lyrical genius with classical training to create heavenly, textured and multidimensional music that keeps everyone coming back.
In Ascension, Kinsley isn’t just making music—she’s creating stitching fleeting memories into a timeless, evocative mosaic for the world.
