Brittany Davis Brings The ‘Thunder’ On New LP

A sightless, millennial African-American who lived an itinerant childhood before finding her community in Seattle, Brittany Davis has long described herself as a vessel through which any number of musical spirits freely move.

In the rock-leaning Painted Shield with mentor Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam, she’s a Swiss army knife of a vocal harmonist and a certified keyboard wiz. As both a solo artist and the leader of her own group, she’s subsumed hip-hop, R&B, soul, and, on a 2024 concept album cleverly titled Image Issues, everything from Outkast and Cardi B to Jimi Hendrix and Beyoncé.

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For the sessions that eventually birthed Black Thunder, Davis settled into Gossard’s Studio Litho for 48 hours with producer Josh Evans, drummer D’Vonne Lewis, and bassist Evan Flory-Barnes — and nothing else planned. The result, out now on Gossard’s Loosegroove Records imprint, is “one of the most productive two days I’ve ever seen,” he previously told SPIN. “This record is a fully realized, arranged, amazing story that was basically channeled through Brittany.”

And what a record it is, powered by the deep generational impact of slavery and oppression on the collective African-American identity and Davis’ desires to feel loved in her own skin. Interludes featuring the clanking of metal chains and the sound of 250-year-old spirituals amplify the arresting, completely improvised music therein, as Davis rattles off weighty rhetorical questions about the inability to choose your genetic lottery and whether some higher power could one day change all the things about herself with which she struggles daily.

The prevailing free jazz sound only ups the intensity, as Davis and company are in beautiful, mellow, Keith Jarrett territory one minute and confrontational, avant-garde beast mode the next. “My evolution has not become flat,” she sings triumphantly on “All You Get.” In a sea of musicians with nothing to say and nowhere to grow, Davis deserves our deepest appreciation.