New Artist of the Week: Half Waif

What Thread-pulling singer-songwriter.
Where Massachusetts, US.
Why Half Waif, aka Nandi Rose Plunkett, is the daughter of an Indian-refugee mother and an American father of Irish-Swiss descent – a background that the Massachusetts musician says has often made her search for a sense of home.

The artist's new album, Lavender, due in April, takes its title from the plant that her 95-year-old grandmother would boil in her English home; the album is largely inspired by witnessing her relative's life draw to a peaceful close.

“It is an elegy to time, the pilgrimages we take, and the ultimate slow plod towards our end,” Plunkett says. “It is an examination of the way we fracture, inside ourselves and inside our relationships – the fissures that creep along the structures we build, the tendency towards disintegration.”

In doing so, Plunkett says, the album is a talisman to ward off the feeling of decay, a totem for healing and a nudge of encouragement to be alive.

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The album's first single, Keep It Out, has a slow-burning atmosphere inspired, like her own background, by music of disparate sources – specifically, Celtic singing and "sad chord changes" of music from the 19th century.

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