When: 7pm on Friday 21 October 2022
Where: Albert Hall, 27 Peter Street, Manchester M2 5QR

We’re delighted to be presenting Angel Olsen at Albert Hall!

Fresh grief, like fresh love, has a way of sharpening our vision and bringing on painful clarifications. No matter how temporary we know these states to be, the vulnerability and transformation they demand can overpower the strongest among us. Then there are the rare, fertile moments when both occur, when mourning and limerence heighten, complicate and explain each other; the songs that comprise Angel Olsen’s Big Time were forged in such a whiplash.

Big Time is an album about the expansive power of new love, but this brightness and optimism is tempered by a profound and layered sense of loss. During Olsen’s process of coming to terms with her queerness and confronting the traumas that had been keeping her from fully accepting herself, she felt it was time to come out to her parents, a hurdle she’d been avoiding for some time. ‘Finally, at the ripe age of 34, I was free to be me,’ she said. Three days later, her father died and shortly after her mother passed away. The shards of this grief – the shortening of her chance to finally be seen more fully by her parents – are scattered throughout the album.

Three weeks after her mother’s funeral she was on a plane to Los Angeles to spend a month in Topanga Canyon, recording this incredibly wise and tender new album. Loss has long been a subject of Olsen’s elegiac songs, but few can write elegies with quite the reckless energy as she. If that bursting-at-the-seams, running downhill energy has come to seem intractable to her work, this album proves Olsen is now writing from a more rooted place of clarity. She’s working with an elastic, expansive mastery of her voice – both sonically and artistically. These are songs not just about transformational mourning, but of finding freedom and joy in the privations as they come.

Tour support comes from Tomberlin. Tomberlin is Sarah Beth Tomberlin, a pastor’s kid born in Florida, raised in rural Illinois. She wrote the majority of her debut while living at home. For a while after leaving home and church, she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. She worked a day job and kept writing songs. She posted some of these songs to Bandcamp, which led to her signing a record deal with Saddle Creek, and her debut album, At Weddings. It all happened fast: less than a year after her first live show, she performed on Jimmy Kimmel and she ended up moving to L.A. which is where she wrote Projections (2020), her EP follow-up to At Weddings, though she recorded it in Philadelphia. She followed up in April 2022 with new album i don’t know who needs to hear this…

This show is a co-promotion with Now Wave.

This is a 14+ show. Under 16s must be accompanied by an adult.

Buy tickets now. Tickets are also available from Dice.fm, Gigantic.com and Ticketline.co.uk, plus on 0871 220 0260.

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