The Past Is Still Alive: Hurray for the Riff Raff Releases a Masterwork of Modern Folk-Rock

On Tour Across The US Now, Red Rocks & New Dates with Norah Jones Just Added

"Alynda Segarra is narrating their own experiences, etching their own story into the American songbook, and asserting that they belong there"

The New York Times

"The next great American road album is here"

The Atlantic

"Fantastic...part folk-punk memoir, part harm-reduction PSA, part spiritual invocation and/or world-historical séance"

Pitchfork, Best New Music

"This is Hurray for the Riff Raff's Hejira, this is that Joni Mitchell high point. It reminds me of Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels on a Gravel Road"

-Ann Powers, NPR Music

With the momentous arrival of The Past Is Still Alive, Hurray for the Riff Raff has just released the album of their life so far. Both a memoir and a roadmap to America's fringes, Alynda Segarra (they/them) delivers profound reflections on time, memory, love and loss, by way of the radical, real-life experiences they had always worried were too much to reveal. Creating this record "felt like a trust fall," Segarra says. "Or a letting go of this idea of proving something to the music industry – how I can be more digestible, modifiable, sellable. I feel like I'm closer to what I actually have to share."

Listen to The Past Is Still Alive via Nonesuch

Produced by Brad Cook, with contributions from Anjimile, Conor Oberst, Meg Duffy, Mike Mogis, Phil Cook, S.G. Goodman and more, The Past Is Still Alive is built on twin pillars of peril and promise that have forever been foundational to this country. On opener "Alibi,"Segarra reckons with the effects of addiction in NYC's Lower East Side. With "Hawkmoon," they honor the life-changing impact instilled by the first trans woman they ever met, a fellow traveler named Miss Jonathan, while "Colossus of Roads" offers a paean for queerness, outsiders and the collective fight to survive in spite of violence. The epic "Ogallala" recounts a journey to evade the cops on empty Nebraska highways, while "Snake Plant (The Past Is Still Alive)" paints vivid scenes of family, childhood, and the adventures that came when they left it all behind: hitchhiking and hopping freight trains, lighting campfires and making love on superfund sites, shoplifting for food and playing music with a barrel of freaks. Segarra's poetic power proves why they have become a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement, illustrating inequality and independence, and navigating chaos and trauma with a sense of wonder and want.

Alynda Segarra has discussed the album in new interviews with The New York Times, NPR's Morning Edition, Vogue and more, citing inspirations such as poet Eileen Myles, boxcar artist buZ blurr, and the history of AIDS activist groups such as ACT UP and Gran Fury.

Recorded a month after the sudden passing of their father, and made in his loving memory, The Past Is Still Alive brings a new beginning in Alynda Segarra's evolution as a storyteller. Baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in punk haunts and queer spaces, they accepted The People's Voice Award at Folk Alliance International's 2024 International Folk Music Awards this month. Now, they are performing the music of The Past Is Still Alive on a spring tour of dozens of shows throughout the US, UK and EU. In partnership with PLUS1, $1 per ticket will support This Must Be The Place and their work to distribute Naloxone - the lifesaving medicine that reverses an overdose, and will be available for free at every Hurray for the Riff Raff tour stop.

Find the list of dates and tickets at hurrayfortheriffraff.com/tour, including Red Rocks Amphitheatre and a series of other newly added performances with

Norah Jones.

Praise For The Past Is Still Alive

"A memoir, a travelogue, a loose campfire singalong…Segarra is narrating their own experiences, etching their own story into the American songbook, and asserting that they belong there"

The New York Times

"The next great American road album is here...Segarra revisits memories of their youth to draw a subversive—and heartbreaking—map of the nation"

The Atlantic

"Alynda Segarra has been a patron saint of troubadours for fifteen years…The Past Is Still Alive continues a mission of record-keeping for outcasts, including those memories closest to home"

The New Yorker

"Alynda Segarra has created an epic tale of life on the road, a nearly mythic version of their own life story that stands alongside other great American musical travelogues…This is Hurray for the Riff Raff's Hejira, this is that Joni Mitchell high point"

Ann Powers, NPR Music

"Part folk-punk memoir, part harm-reduction PSA, part spiritual invocation and/or world-historical séance...we see softness and joy in the human experience and, lurking in the background, violence, fentanyl, and barrels of crude"

Pitchfork, Best New Music

"Astonishingly realized…the best batch of songs Segarra's ever written"

Rolling Stone

"Alynda Segarra is finding freedom in grief…their new record functions as a kind of queer Americana ode to the colorful cast of characters they have encountered over the years"

Vogue

"Their best album…The Past Is Still Alive, the star's ninth studio album, stands alone as a triumph in its production, performance and songwriting and practically every other metric"

Billboard

"Hurray for the Riff Raff has written what is, in my opinion, the most important album of the 2020s so far—a stark, multi-dimensional account of boundless communal love, meditations on class disparity and despair and fear synthesized into a container of relentless courage. The Past Is Still Alive is a manifest, a readiment to remain alive as the world burns all around us"

Paste, Cover Story

"Alynda Segarra is not just a musician but a historian…they honed in on a style and craft that has positioned them as one of our great American bards, telling the stories of undocumented immigrants, queer folks and addicts"

PAPER

"This great American adventure comes across like an On the Road for the age of face tattoos and fentanyl addictions. There is an end-times mood to this record but the music and vocal delivery are so accomplished, so clean, melodic and catchy, that a suggestion of hope and ambition runs through it too"

The Times ****

"There's a sense of time looping in Segarra's ninth album, in which the singer-songwriter revisits their saturated backstory to remember loved ones, honour fellow travellers and 'watch the world burn' with a tear in their eye. There are words of love for suicidal addicts and a sense of the distance travelled, while remaining constant: an outlier whose solidarity with the runaways and the marginalised endures"

Observer ****

"The Past Is Still Alive manages to be both stirring and tranquil...Segarra's most important work to date"

UPROXX

"Bringing their backgrounds to a genre that heavily implies that they don't belong...The Past Is Still Alive is about putting the past and the present in contact with each other. It's about making sure everyone knows that we are the ones making history as we live our lives"

Refinery29

"Eloquent, memoir-like snapshots of communion, love, and tragedy with the closeness of a late-night heart-to-heart with a lifelong friend"

Remezcla

"The album calls to mind the albums John Lennon made in New York, a gritty mash-up of folk-rock, country, and other classic American musical forms, all of it giving subway busker more than campfire singer. It comes alive in the way great novels do, each chapter as riveting as the last"

Bandcamp Daily

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