Carrying Places Inside You: Reeya Banerjee’s Map of Sound
Some albums are cartography, tracing lines and borders of experience, others explode as soundtracks, shedding light on the unwritten film of our lives. This Place, Reeya Banerjee's second solo album from Hudson Valley, is both—a map and a reel of cinema sketched out of song. Her voice, fire and shadow, shatters silence and ferments memory into melody. By its sweep, a decade of living—heartbreaks weathered, cities moved, arrivals fought hard for—becomes audible. These songs don’t just point to locations on a map; they testify to the invisible weight of carrying every place you’ve ever belonged, long after you’ve gone.
Whereas her COVID-era album The Way Up was born in isolation and introspection, This Place overflows with collaboration and convergence. Produced with longtime friend and writer Luke Folger, and recorded at Brooklyn's Lorien Sound Recording Studios, the album is a scream of ambition and scope. From whispered-soft epiphany to choruses with aspirations for a scream-full stadium, every note is glinting with vulnerability and defiance. Scars are chords here, verses are thrusts, and the past is re-molded into a survival playlist. Where her first album healed in spite of itself, this one sees her going out into life's storm.
The singles chart like planets in this life. "Misery of Place" ignites with snarling guitars, a tempest-tossed hymn of despair. "For the First Time" glows with apprehensive beginnings, a soft hymn of revival. "Runner" pulses with adrenalin, a scream of every beast that has fled from death just to live. And "Upstate Rust"—already summoning others to this hymn in the internets—burns with a half-grit, half-hymnal glory, asserting love, in all its crudity, is still worth the leap. Each cut its own climate, and all together, a mosaic of motion and remembrance, a sky of sun and squall.
Ultimately, though, This Place surpasses geography. It's not cities in the rear view so much as what remains when rearview is spent and still in the rear: the artist, the survivor, the self-built. Reeya borrows the empty rage of Alanis, the lyrical bite of Fiona Apple, the bombast of Peter Gabriel and Springsteen but is herself. This album does not merely invite you to listen, but to be where this place is, to claim its stories as your own. It is her bravest work yet, a cautionary note that it is simple to leave, but to be complete where you are headed—that is the work of this album.
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