Quiet in a World Full of Noise

Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. That shared vision frst brought them together on 2022’s Pigments—icy and warm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly—and now it has reunited them for Quiet in a World Full of Noise.

By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noise blends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifuous soul, jazz, and journalistic vocalizing—driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. The new album fnds Richard at her most raw and exposed. This year, Richard’s musician father experienced mini strokes while being diagnosed with cancer; and last year, her cousin Cisco was fatally shot seven times in New Orleans. Richard channels the emotional impact of these traumatic experiences of loss into her lyrics and vocal performances, which are left bare and human here, raw and unprocessed across the album. Quiet expands the defnitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-garde R&B by rewriting them altogether.

On paper, Richard and Zahn’s audacious, impressionistic musical collaborations feel like a surprising match. Richard, a New Orleans–reared visionary, has had an improbable journey from late 2000s reality television and mainstream pop with girl group Danity Kane to become one of the most prolifc, experimental, and visible indie R&B singer-songwriters of the last decade and a half, with seven solo albums under her belt. Zahn is an East Coast–raised multi-instrumentalist and composer working at the intersections of jazz, Americana, classical, and ambient pop. His growing solo discography includes People of the Dawn, Sunday Painter, Pale Horizon, and Statues I & II, as well as the duo’s frst release, Pigments. “Pigments was one of the best projects I’ve ever made,” Richard says, “and the furthest I’ve ever been pushed as an artist.” The album was a critical hit, hailed as Best New Music by Pitchfork and receiving praise from Stereogum as Album of the Week, NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, The Fader, Bitter Southerner, and Edition, among many other publications.