Toronto’s NYSSA announces Shake Me Where I’m Foolish, her new album set for release on Feb 1, 2024. Self-produced and mixed by renowned studio master Sylvia Massy, this is NYSSA’s first for Six Shooter Records. On the new album, NYSSA fetches the bolt cutters, rattles the cages of so-called emotional maturity and braids together centuries of mystics and mythos from ancient lands. Flutes, sirens, latex and minotaurs: this is the world of Shake Me Where I’m Foolish.

Named for a line in a poem by Chicago free verse poet Carl Sandburg, “Baby Song of the Four Winds,” Shake Me Where I’m Foolish invokes rebirth, freshness and freedom. The north wind, a cold plunge, a grotto of pleasure, going out beyond the breakwater, a night run amok: there are ways to break loose. The title calls the quarters and sets the stage for 11 songs that tread this garden of earthly delights. From the first track, “The Initiate,” NYSSA opens the wardrobe to a Punk Rock Narnia, an otherworld of her own design.

“Blessèd Touch,” out today, pulls like the tides. In this new song, NYSSA writes a “Sign of the Times” style pagan gospel: “I am addressing my daemons, my ancestors, and the gods and spirits that wish me well,” she says. “This is a beseeching prayer for something bigger, something divine, to come in and shake loose the stuck and the brittle. The song summons an Otherworld crossroads, a beach at night where a spell is cast and change invoked.” Alarmist and escapist, the song lays wintry domesticity at the altar of a wilder, warmer shore.

Also out today, “No More Bodies” connects with NYSSA’s lineage, a course forever changed by the crossing of an ocean. The song is “about a feeling of rootlessness, of being a first-generation descendent of an Irish mother, and feeling this constant sense of distance from the land of my ancestors,” NYSSA shares. “‘No More Bodies’ is my banshee- invoker. My keening cry for liberation. A howl and a fist raised and shook. Grief released.”

This fall, NYSSA continues to preview material in kindred locales around the world. In Berlin, the slinky dance cave frenzy of “Breakup Party” fits the scene. Montreal, a place of midnight transformation, is home of the “Werewolf,” the haircuts and anxieties of youth. In Ireland, her ancestral home, Gaelic traditions that run deep in NYSSA’s blood come bubbling up to the surface. NYSSA’s travels mirror and enhance the geographic, mythological and polytheistic touchstones of her sophomore collection. Transportive and borderless, NYSSA’s songs ride the four winds to distant lands.

Six Shooter Records releases Shake Me Where I’m Foolish on Imbolc, a Gaelic and pagan traditional festival, February 1, 2024.

Shake Me Where I’m Foolish Track List

1. The Initiate
2. The Mystery
3. Breakup Party
4. Blessed Touch
5. WereWolf
6. Good Kind of Bad
7. Death and Desire
8. Creature 2 Creature
9. Bodies
10. My Gemini
11. Hell I Raise

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TOUR DATES

Toronto, ON: C U Next Tuesday, Hugh’s Room, Nov 7 w/ T. Thomason
Montreal, QC: Sala Rossa, M for Montreal Nov 16
Dublin, IE: Ruby Sessions, Nov 21
Dublin, IE: Little Whelan’s, Nov 30

ABOUT NYSSA

Toronto pagan-punk-poet NYSSA has put her hands into the lion’s mouth, gathering her performing and songwriting powers to conjure the unruly energy of rock n’ roll. Out from under fear’s thumb, NYSSA now sings about wild things, old gods, romance-beyond- borders, and the exorcism of trauma. She has quested, and she has returned.

The goal is fevered connection, a ritual-sense of music as communal release. NYSSA keens and wails and brings her audience along with her to a place of deep feeling, movement, and joy. Her lyrics are poetic and clear, lunar, eerie, angry; NYSSA’s voice is the strong container for all of it. As Dionysus would want it, over-abundance is the way. Guided by the incantation and invocation of the three C’s: Collaboration, Choreo, Covenhood!, NYSSA’s sound and stories run deep into ancient mythos, Celtic lore and back through our modern idols. Re-swaggering, re-wilding hyper-masc night moves and magick hips (think Jagger, Mink Deville, Danzig), NYSSA’s magnetic, elastic ways make satyrs of us all.

Long-listed for the 2021 Polaris Music Prize for her debut solo album Girls Like Me, NYSSA now plays with a killer 6-piece band, a real rock ’n roll coven, featuring Nastia Koza (KOZA), Jay Anderson (Badge Époque Ensemble, Biblical), Brandon Lim (Yamantaka//Sonic Titan), and Jess Burgess (Essie Watts).