The Past Is Still Alive: Orange Vinyl LP

Label: Nonesuch
Release Date: 23rd February

Hurray for the Riff Raff aka Alynda Segarra returns to the classic storytelling country folk that made them one of the most compelling songwriters around. We're hooked to this early single already.

With the announcement of their latest and most liberating album to date, Hurray For The Riff Raff (aka Alynda Segarra, they/them) opens the doorway to a language and world that are finally their own.  The Past Is Still Alive represents a new beginning in Segarra’s lauded evolution as a storyteller. During a period of pain and personal grief, they found inspiration in radical poetry, railroad culture, outsider art, the work of writer Eileen Myles, and the history of activist groups like ACT UP and Gran Fury.  Discovering a stronger, more singular style of writing, Segarra uses their lyrics as memory boxes to process their trauma, identity, and dreams for the future.  They immortalize and say goodbye to those they have loved and lost, illustrate the many shapes and patterns of time’s passing, and honor the heartbroken and the hopeful parts of themselves, as they deliver a first-person telling of their life so far.  It is both a memoir and a roadmap, and though The Past Is Still Alive was made in North Carolina and produced by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Kevin Morby, Waxahatchee), the Bronx-born, New Orleans-based Segarra brings listeners to places far beyond: vivid experiences of small shops and buffalo stampedes in Santa Fe, childhood road trips to Florida, struggles of addiction in the Lower East Side, days-long journeys to outrun the cops in Nebraska, and more, across their most magnetic collection of songs yet.  

“The Past Is Still Alive is an album grappling with time, memory, love and loss, recorded in Durham, NC a month after losing my Father.  ‘Alibi’ is a plea, a last-ditch effort to get through to someone you already know you’re gonna lose.  It’s a song to myself, to my Father, almost fooling myself because I know what’s done is done.  But it feels good to beg.  A reckoning with time and memory.  The song is exhausted with loving someone so much it hurts.  Addiction separates us.  With memories of the Lower East Side in the early 2000s of my childhood, mixed with imagery of the endless West that calls to artists and wanderers.” – Alynda Segarra/Hurray For The Riff Raff 

The follow-up to their acclaimed Nonesuch debut, Life on Earth – which landed on Best of 2022 lists from the New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR Music, Mojo, and Uncut, among others – The Past Is Still Alive sees Hurray For The Riff Raff reunite with Brad Cook, while further expanding their creative cast of collaborators.  Anjimile, Conor Oberst, and S.G. Goodman all join Alynda Segarra on vocals at various points throughout the LP, with a band of musicians including Cook, Libby Rodenbough, Matt Douglas, Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, Mike Mogis, Phil Cook, and Yan Westerlund.  Mike Mogis also mixed the album, and it was mastered by Heba Kadry.  

The “nature punk” of Life on Earth marked a departure for Hurray For The Riff Raff, as they contemplated surviving and thriving amidst a world in crisis.  The Past Is Still Alive brings the focus back inwards, with arrangements that are raw, melodies direct and indelible, and lyrics that are personal yet largely rooted in family and community.  There are love songs to real characters, locations and mythic figures like Sky Red Hawk (‘Buffalo’); the first trans woman Segarra ever met (‘Hawkmoon’); queerness and sacred spaces for outsiders and the vulnerable, in the aftermath of the Club Q shooting (‘Colossus of Roads’); leaving home behind and discovering oneself on the edge of the world (‘Snake Plant’); and short-lived romances and the wisdom gained through chaos (‘Vetiver’).  Elsewhere, in the self-portraits painted on first single ‘Alibi’, ‘Ogallala’, and other album highlights, Segarra reflects on the land they have traveled, the hardships witnessed, and bravery gained while running away from everything and everyone they knew at age seventeen, hopping freight trains and hitchhiking across the country with a band of street urchins. 

In recent months, Hurray For The Riff Raff debuted a stage adaptation of their beloved 2017 album, The Navigator, based on their quest to reclaim their Puerto Rican identity.  They also toured with Bright Eyes and First Aid Kit, performed for the Late Show with Stephen Colbertand NPR Music’s 15^th Anniversary Concert, played festivals like Pitchfork, and more.  Next spring, they will bring the music of The Past Is Still Alive on the road, for a headline tour across the US and Europe, including NYC’s Music Hall of Williamsburg on March 5, LA’s Belasco on April 5, and London’s Electric Brixton on May 17, plus Big Ears Festival and dozens of other stops.  Additionally, Hurray For The Riff Raff has partnered with PLUS1 so that $1 per ticket goes to supporting This Must Be the Place and their work to distribute Naloxone – the lifesaving medicine that reverses an overdose, and will be available for free at every Hurray For The Riff Raff tour stop.  

Born in the Bronx and of Puerto Rican heritage, Alynda Segarra was raised there by a blue-collar aunt and uncle, as their father navigated Vietnam trauma and their mother neglected them to work for the likes of Rudy Giuliani.  They were radicalized before they were a teenager, baptized in the anti-war movement and galvanized in New York’s punk haunts and queer spaces.  At seventeen, Segarra split, becoming the kid in a communal squat before shuttling to California, where they began crisscrossing the country by hopping trains.  They eventually found home – spiritual, emotional, physical – in New Orleans, forming a hobo band and realizing that music was not only a way to share what they had learned and seen but to learn and see more.  Hurray For The Riff Raff steadily rose from house shows to major stages, where Segarra became a pan-everything fixture of the modern folk movement.  But that yoke became a burden, prompting Segarra to make the probing and poignant electronic opus, 2022’s Life on Earth, their Nonesuch debut.  On The Past Is Still Alive, Segarra finally tells their story themselves, speckling stirring reflections on love, loss, and the end or evolution of the United States with foundational scenes from their own life.  Out February 23, 2024, on Nonesuch, it is the record of Segarra’s life so far, not only because it chronicles the past to understand the present but also because it is the most magnetic thing Hurray For The Riff Raff have yet made.