Something of a fixture on the New York music scene, Ivy Meissner has been playing in various bands for the best part of a decade now. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Ivy has been writing and recording music for as long as she can remember but considers her upcoming debut under the Little Mystery moniker to be her real debut. Recorded with a crack team of New York regulars, Little Mystery will see the light of day next month via Ruination Records and is previewed today as Ivy premieres her latest single, the “decadent rock mini-epic”, Shame.

Although appearing early in the record’s proceedings, Ivy describes Shame as, “the emotional lodestone of the album”, its playful take on Glam Rock contrasting the painful lyricism. The track dabbles with elements of Ivy’s past she’d previously kept buried, tackling trauma and the often negative responses when women try to express it, as she sings of internalising her shame, “like any woman, I was told to hold my pain close, oh, I made it mine”. Ultimately as the song progresses, we see Ivy starting to shed her shame, starting to accept none of this was her fault, “as the tide kept growing stronger, the push would pull me back to the truth, I wouldn’t change now”.

Perhaps it’s that sense of empowerment that comes with her mental clarity that results in this song sounding so contrastingly light, as if she’s decided now is the time to open the door, put on her sunglasses and strut, shoulders popping like Marc Bolan in his pomp. The whole thing is delightfully bombastic, the guitars howling and free-form, with flourishes of almost Motown-like brass, and the vocal, oh so perfectly poised and effortlessly cool in an Aldous Harding kind of way, while entirely Ivy’s own. Here in four minutes of musical wonder, Little Mystery takes the dark moments and makes them into something triumphant, a celebration of keeping on, pushing through and coming out the other side ready to claim your long-deserved moment in the sun.

Of the accompanying video Ruination Records state: Directed by Meissner and bandmate Julian Cubillos, the song’s video finds Meissner stuck at a party she feels like she can’t escape—a claustrophobic purgatory evoking depersonalization and dissociation. Three guardian muses (dancers Lindsey Weaving, Sophie Bromberg, and Leanna Grennan) appear to free her and light her way towards self-affirmation and catharsis.

Little Mystery is out July 26th via Ruination Record Co. For more information on Little Mystery visit https://linktr.ee/littlemysterymusic.