California-born, NY-based singer/songwriter Sarah Kinsley released a new EP, The King, in 2021, and she's now followed it with her first single of the year, "Hills of Fire," a dynamic alt-pop track with an accompanying video directed by her frequent collaborator Lux. About the song, Kinsley says:
The King had just been put forth into the world. Never had my music reached such heights, so many people, so many ears, so many minds. My family and I had run to the other coast, in part to drive towards sunsets and valleys, and on the other hand, to drive away from the noise around The King. I remember being completely and utterly surrounded by blue: we drove up a steep hill—where it felt that if you eased up on the gas for just a moment the entire car might slowly begin to slide back down—and even now I can see my father laughing as we ascend up the path. "Sarah, look! It’s like we’re...driving into the sky!" "Hills Of Fire" was born here. In my birthplace, in California. It was within this moment, along with others, that I could feel that the next body of musical work I would write and create would be centered around this unravelling, the growth of uncertainty, the unknowing.
"Hills Of Fire" captured the resurgence of that feeling, when the daunting tide of possibility feels so close to your fingertips and your eyes and nose that you can smell the salt of what could be and what might be, that anything and everything feels within reach. This track holds that pinnacle of light for me, it’s the reckoning of the un-conquering of space within my mind, the deciphering of what lays behind, the calling, the beckoning of the new. I can’t stay the king forever. Possibility always holds this double-edged-ness to it, the relinquishing of past and the embrace of the ever-moving future, the burning horizon of the beyond. This lives within "Hills Of Fire," seeps into its atmosphere. Every sonic element, every punch of percussion, every soaring individual violin layer I’ve recorded from my apartment, every rolling synth, is drenched in the sweetness of possibility. There is nothing else but this overpowering feeling. Can we make it out?