Celeste Krishna seamlessly combines the grit of classic rock with the elegance of late 1960s Motown arrangements.
~ Courtesy Benno NYC
Celeste Krishna, the Alabama-raised, Brooklyn–based singer-songwriter and producer – known for her Laurel Canyon pen with a Muscle Shoals pocket – announces the release of her sixth studio album, The New Room, out October 10th.
A bold exploration of fertility, womanhood, migration, and artistic legacy, The New Room pairs head-nodding grooves with poetic, often humorous storytelling. Recorded live-to-tape with a full band and steeped in a late 1960s vintage sound, it is Celeste’s first full-length record as the sole producer and arranger.
Returning to her Southern roots with this album—and to the analog soul-rock sound she crafted on her first three albums under the moniker Monarchs—Celeste seamlessly combines the grit of classic rock with the
elegance of late 1960s Motown arrangements. The journey of creating and releasing The New Room parallels her fertility journey and the eventual birth of her daughter.
The album’s title serves as a metaphor for welcoming new life and becoming a mother—her daughter as the
newest addition to her family. It is also the conceptual follow-up to her previous album, My Blue House, named for the actual blue house of her maternal grandmother in Tuscaloosa, where in 1967 the family built an addition they still call “the new room.”
Celeste explains: “‘The new room’ was basically the party room for my mom and aunts coming of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I decided to restrict production to the technology and workflows of that era and
basically make a rock ‘n’ soul album my family would dig.”
To achieve the sound of The New Room, Celeste used analog gear and recorded and mixed on
reel-to-reel tape with engineer and studio owner Brad Bensko at Bearded Cat Studios in Mystic,
CT. Following in the footsteps of artists like Frazey Ford (Indian Ocean) and Cat Power (The
Greatest)—both of whom worked with legendary Memphis rhythm sections—Celeste recorded the songs with a rhythm section playing together live in the same room—bringing a Muscle Shoals spirit to Mystic, with Adele Fournet (Tipa Tipo/La Banda Chuska/Combo Daguerre) on keyboards, Felipe Wurst (Tipa Tipo/La Banda Chuska) on guitar, Michael Kane (The Specialists) on drums, and Ran Livneh (Habbina Habbina) on bass.
The New Room arrives alongside a broader cultural wave of women, queer artists, and artists of color reclaiming Southern-rooted music—from Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter to Chappell Roan’s The Giver—a resurgence that is subversive, joyful, and unapologetically feminist. Within the indie sphere, she stands alongside artists like Brittany Howard and Margo Price, who continue to expand and reimagine the Southern musical tradition.
The album finds Celeste in conversation with the male-dominated legacy of the music she grew up on in
Alabama—Southern rock, country, and classic soul. Despite women’s foundational contributions to these genres, the classic rock legends often celebrated were predominantly men, as were the producers, arrangers, and songwriters who shaped the late ’60s era sound. By stepping in as sole producer and arranger, Celeste claims authorship in this landscape, reframing the canon with her own perspective.
Rather than reproducing these genre’s tropes, Celeste flips the script: celebrating love that is sustaining rather than suffering (Honey Hole), dismantling the myth of the wandering cowboy (No Ramblin’ Man), and poking holes in rock’s cult of celebrity (Living Rockstar).
What emerges is a body of work that treats vulnerability as power. In one of its most searing moments, Pink Shade addresses the gender-based emotional violence often perpetuated within Southern households. Elsewhere, Celeste turns to migration, impermanence, and artistic legacy—subjects that can feel philosophical—yet she makes them intimate and resonant through personal experience. Her music balances rooted authenticity, social critique, and surreal imagination—Jedi photoshoots, space travel, singing armadillos—revealing how joy, humor, and honesty can subvert even the most established myths. In this approach, she follows artists like Bill Withers, who found profound power in writing about friendship, family, and vulnerability with unflinching honesty.
On Record, inspired by NASA’s Voyager Golden Record, she contemplates music’s power to communicate across impossible distances, turning the spacecraft’s message to extraterrestrial life into a meditation on art beyond fame and capitalism:”Ain’t gotta get no fortune or fame, for me to give my song away.”
Every track bears her singular stamp as producer and arranger, yet the record emerges as a “new room” where her vision meets the live-to-tape energy of trusted bandmates and friends, proving that claiming authorship can still honor the communal spirit of making music together.
About the Artist: Celeste Krishna is an artist and producer who composes songs as a life practice, blending Southern musical traditions with the emotional vulnerability of soul. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama and now based in Brooklyn, Celeste’s work is characterized by a “disarmingly soulful” style and has earned her recognition as a “true-blue Southern soul in lyrics & voice” by The Austin Chronicle.
