New York singer-songwriter talks about new album

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a night last This summer, Allegra Krieger woke up to an apartment filled with smoke. Unable to open the fire escape, she stumbled out of her fifth-floor apartment in New York’s Chinatown into an even smokier stairwell. “I just took a deep breath and ran down the stairs, and the smoke got thicker and thicker until you couldn’t see anything,” the 28-year-old singer-songwriter recalls. “So I fell, and then a fireman found me and got me out… Then you’re standing outside and watching it happen. You’re half asleep, panicking, and then you’re on the other side.”

A few days later — unharmed but shaken and living in a city-provided hotel room — Krieger wrote a haunting, haunting song called “One or the Other.” “Nancy from the second floor died/On her bed with the door open,” she sings over moody guitar chords. “She tried to get out but must have turned/Couldn’t fight the light anymore.” The song builds to a haunting chorus: “What do you know about living?/What do you know about dying?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in my life worrying about whether I was even alive,” Krieger says now, nearly a year after the fire caused by lithium-ion batteries in a ground-floor e-bike shop that killed four of her neighbors. “And in that moment, whatever had happened earlier in the day, whatever stress … the real feeling I had right afterward was that I was so grateful that I made it out of there.”

“One or the Other” is one of several songs on Krieger’s upcoming Art of the Invisible Infinity Machine (released on September 13th) on Double Double Whammy) that explore big questions about existence and transience. In that sense, they are classic Allegra Krieger songs. On releases like this new album and her breakthrough in 2023 I stay on the fragile planeshe is both a philosopher and a songwriter. She writes stream-of-consciousness lyrics that reflect on her place in the universe and measure the distance between mind and body. “When I write, it’s more of a discovery or curiosity,” she says. “I figure it out in my own head. Just musings.”

Sitting with a cup of coffee in a diner booth in Midtown Manhattan, not far from where she now lives in another temporary housing facility, Krieger talks about her influences, such as 20th-century Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector – her 1964 classic The passion for GH is a favorite – it’s clear she has a unique intelligence. Krieger has also been known to stroll into the science section of a bookstore and pick up a volume on physics as a light read. “Not because I’ve ever been that interested in science,” she explains. “But something about physics and the fourth dimension inspires me as a writer when I’m trying to understand things that are really hard to understand.”

She’s always been like that: a restless spirit, a seeker. She grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, took piano and dance lessons and started writing songs around age eight. “The first song I remember was called ‘The Shadows of My Life,'” she says. “So I always had a little bit of drama and emotion. I spent a lot of my childhood just sitting and thinking.”

Her parents’ Catholic faith was a refuge for her from an early age. “There was a time when I found a lot of comfort in religion,” she says. “All my life, until I was about 18. It was something I was really committed to.”

But music had just as much of a hold on her. As a child, she had a transformative experience with the film Shrek. “I thought ‘Hallelujah’ was the most beautiful song,” she says. “It’s funny that it Shrekbut the scene where ‘Hallelujah’ is played? I was moved to tears.” Through listening to other versions of this song, she met Jeff Buckley, who was a big influence on her.

A few years later, her family moved back to Reading, Pennsylvania, where they had lived at the time of her birth, and her horizons expanded again. “There was this little record store there,” she recalls. “We didn’t have a record store back in Florida, so this was all new to her.” One day she went in and saw Elliott Smith’s Either … or When she played it at home on a record player she bought at Urban Outfitters, she discovered a songwriter whose intensity matched what she was feeling as she headed toward a teenage crisis of faith.

“I was depressed, as I see it now, all through high school,” she says. “There was a really dark time where I just wasn’t myself. I don’t think I knew who I was or what I believed in.”

Krieger moved to Boston and enrolled for two semesters at Berklee College of Music, but dropped out and instead embarked on an aimless odyssey of odd jobs across the U.S. that lasted until her early twenties. “I was waiting for something to ground me,” she says. “I worked at this little roadside motel in the desert in California. I lived on this farm in North Carolina. I worked in a bar there. Then someone I met there told me about this tree-planting job in Georgia, so I moved there.” (She quit that job shortly after making the sobering realization that the loblolly and longleaf pines she was planting were destined to be turned into pulp.)

In 2020, she took a job at a sports bar in Long Beach, California, which she later immortalized in her song “Nothing in This World Ever Stays Still” as the place where she “wrote down an order for boom-boom shrimp.” Fans now sing along to that line at her shows, though Krieger admits she embellished it slightly for poetic purposes: “The menu didn’t say boom-boom shrimp, it said bang-bang shrimp. But I felt like ‘boom-boom shrimp’ rolled off the tongue better.”

Meanwhile, she wrote and recorded songs and released two albums to great acclaim on Brooklyn-based label Northern Spy in 2020 and 2022, followed by a move to Double Double Whammy and a larger audience for I stay on the fragile planeShe has found a steady job as a bartender in New York, which gives her plenty of time to write. “I love being creative in the mornings,” she says. She freewrites lyrics in an ever-growing Google document, starting a new one every month and picking out the best parts for songs when they feel ready: “For the most part, they’re just experiments. I like seeing the words visually.”

She wrote most of the Art of the Invisible Infinity Machine before the fire upended her life. It’s full of songs that expand her sound in remarkable ways, giving electric flesh to her skeletal acoustic ideas. “Never Arriving” is a bright alt-rock anthem that gives the new album its titular catchphrase. “I believe you arrive when you’re born, you arrive when you die, and everything in between is our own doing,” she says. “Came,” another highlight, unfolds in gentle tones at first until Krieger’s voice swells to a scream on the final word: “Now you’re a star or a god or a flame/Fuck your way, forget where you came from came.”

Both songs tap into an emotionally heightened feeling that Krieger associates with addiction. “I definitely had issues with my relationship with alcohol and was addicted to other substances,” she says. “These songs are about chasing that rush, that joy, that elation…Being aware of why you have that impulse helped control that impulse.”

In “Into Eternity,” a rambling gem that forms a centerpiece of the album, she sings about “coming back to New York, my favorite place in the whole wide world.” After years of traveling all over the country, she’s settled in a place she loves.

Krieger recorded the new album last fall at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, working with co-producer Luke Temple of the band Here We Go Magic, who has become a trusted collaborator in recent years. The sound was meant to capture the energy of her occasional live shows with the full band, with backing musicians Jacob Drab on guitar, Will Alexander on drums and Kevin Copeland on bass. (Copeland, her partner, is also the carpenter who made the custom Telecaster she plays at all her shows, which has her first name written on it in glittery letters.)

Once the album comes out, Krieger is excited to bring that sound to new audiences on her first tour with the full band. She also can’t wait to get back in the studio to record some of the new songs she’s written – no doubt with even more moments of casually profound existential insight. “I’ve got another album ready,” she says as the bill arrives at the restaurant. “Honestly, I’m ready.”