Frances Chang

Frances Chang is a musician and multimedia artist living and performing in New York. Combining conventional instrumentation, playful electronics, and poetry, her unique strain of experimental songwriting deals with disrupting accepted reality. Her songs are an exercise in communication, probing the tension between idiosyncratic personal experience and the drive to understand and be understood through a collective language.

Chang’s 2024 album Psychedelic Anxiety is a colorful yet spartan body of work, roomy and playful, capturing a genre the artist refers to as “slacker prog” — offbeat, even jarring, but brimming with spiritual and emotional resonance. Around her, guitar sputters and stops. Vocals branch off like vines on the side of an old house. Infusing artifacts of the mundane with an otherworldly aura, even her love songs live more in the realm of fantasy-horror than the romantic.

Where is Frances headed? A piano is at the center, synths and strings swelling around its shoulders. A little less tension, a lot more production. Some shadows will be encountered, some forgotten skeletons unearthed. Music excavated from the subtler, deeper layers of cerebral and shared experiences. Music that is truly its own.