Frog in the Belly of a Snake

Johanna Warren's seventh solo album is her first since Lessons for Mutants (2022) and her first since she stepped away from touring in 2023 to focus on her health. Self-produced, the process began with demos cut around the Lessons for Mutants sessions that were never meant for release, and that unguarded quality survived into the finished record. She returned to the same studio, band and tape machine to expand them, adding new songs and arrangements before finishing the album in her bedroom.

Frog in the Belly of a Snake moves between lush full-band arrangements and stark a cappella recitation, with psych-folk and indie rock alongside synthesizers, dense vocal harmonies and field recordings gathered outdoors. An album highlight is the twelve-voice Cosmic Serpent Choir, an ensemble Warren assembled that includes Sadie Dupuis, Vera Sola, Elvis Perkins, Rain Phoenix, Cornelia Murr and Chris Harford.

The record asks what feeds us, what consumes us, and what happens if the boundary between the two dissolves. Warren has lived with chronic illness since childhood, and years of touring through fatigue and pain led her to conclude that the career she'd worked hardest to build was taking more than it gave back. Her way back in came through farming, foraging and plant medicine. The songs can be meditative, playful, unsettling and unexpectedly joyful, finding liberation in impermanence and comfort in cycles of death and renewal.