The long wait is over for fans of Nelly Furtado. The indie pop singer released her sixth studio album, The Ride, yesterday (Mar. 31).
After plenty of releases to whet the appetites of those interested in her new direction, Furtado has dropped the full album to praise from critics.
It marks her first new music since 2012’s The Spirit Indestructible. The time in between that album and this was spent doing a bit of soul-searching: the singer took a playwriting class at the University of Toronto and spent some time as a cashier in a friend’s record shop in Toronto.
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“I lost all sense of who I was as an artist – that person who wakes up, sits at the piano in the living room, and writes a song,” she told Maclean’s. “I started to take a step back from the big pop world. I also wanted to be at home raising my daughter rather than raising her on the road. I was depleted when I came off the Loose tour. I also realized that I had to part ways with the longest business relationship of my life – it was like a divorce.”
Furtado ended up enlisting the talents of producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Explosions in the Sky) to help her discover a new sound.
Listen to “Live”, one of the tracks off of The Ride, below: