“a gorgeous excavation of what it meant - and means - to be a girl growing up in a world that wants to tame her passion, defiance and curiosity.” — Miranda Sawyer, BBC6 Music

“emotionally raw…full of bittersweet narrative vignettes drawn from Potter’s turbulent teens.” — UNCUT 

“an often extraordinary change of direction.” — MusicOMH

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Today award-winning filmmaker Sally Potter releases her debut album PINK BIKINI. Known for directing stars like Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek, and Laura Linney in films including Orlando, The Party, and The Roads Not Taken, Potter expertly repurposes her narrative skills on her musical debut. These 12 original, semi-autobiographical songs showcase varied and vivid depictions of what Potter describes as “the key moments of the turbulent female years of transition from childhood to young adulthood that I experienced growing up in the 1960s in London.”

The deeply personal songs make a cross-generational bridge between then and now meaningful to anyone who has weathered the joys and melancholia of teenage years; the loves and losses, terrors and disappointments, and fears of global annihilation, be it nuclear apocalypse then or catastrophic climate change now. 

Listen to Pink Bikini here.

Miranda Sawyer from BBC Radio 6 Music calls the album “a gorgeous excavation of what it meant - and means - to be a girl growing up in a world that wants to tame her passion, defiance and curiosity”. The Gentlewoman praises the album’s “moody orchestrations, rousing protest numbers, and jazzy nods to Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker” while Uncut describes it as“emotionally raw…full of bittersweet narrative vignettes drawn from Potter’s turbulent teens.” MusicOMH praises it as “an often extraordinary change of direction.” 

In a recent Financial Times feature, Potter discusses making a debut album in her 70s and incorporating themes from her films — bodily transformation, sexual awakening, authorship, double standards about female behavior — into her music. Read here. 

Mixed by Peter Hardt and Marta Salogni (Bjork, Bon Iver, Depeche Mode),PINK BIKINI features accompaniment from legendary guitarist Fred Frith (a long-term collaborator on her film soundtracks), along with Laura Snowden and Giacomo Susani (acoustic guitars), Paul Clarvis (percussion), Misha Mullov-Abado (upright bass) and Hattie Webb (harp), to create an intimate and compelling sound world for the songs that tell a raw, truthful story of the early years of her life as an emerging artist.

Released this past spring, the “striking” (KCRW) lead single “Pink Bikini” recounts a painful instance of slut-shaming. Says Potter: “When I was 16, I really did see a pink bikini in a shop window on the way to Victoria Station... Later, in the South of France, badly sunburned in my fruitless attempt to get a tan, I went to the local disco and afterwards “lay on the evening sand” with a French boy. It seemed romantic but led to trouble and despair as I experienced the cruel double standards of the time.”

Listen To Lead Single “Pink Bikini” Here 

Potter describes “Black Mascara” as “a look back over my shoulder to the despairs and longings of my turbulent teenage years; a time of change: the end of childhood, the beginning of life as an adult.” Potter also directed the video for “Black Mascara,” an uncanny and haunting black-and-white timepiece that finds a hula-hooping Potter on a shadowy street corner. Read about the making of the music video at PromoNews.tv

Watch the music video for “Black Mascara” here.