Claire Dickson — Balance

Claire dickson

Balance

On March 13 2026, Claire Dickson, the Berlin-based vocalist, composer, and producer lauded for her “enticingly atmospheric work [that] retains its glow, while seeming to grow in depth and substance on return visits” (The Wire) and whose voice “pierces the sensorial aura, creating an idiosyncratic brand of ambient art pop” (MOJO), announces her new album Balance via New Amsterdam Records.

The 7 tracks on Balance were written and produced by Dickson over three years and are a result of a process she calls "emergent songwriting” where songs grew organically through a daily encounter with her improvising practice. The music explores themes of order and chaos as reflected in personal growth, safety, and the growing pains of living a fulfilled life. Balance features guest performances by an all-star group of forward thinking Brooklyn-based musicians including Lex Korten, Lesley Mok, Zoh Amba, Cleek Schrey, Kitba, Maya Keren, and Jon Starks.

OUT NOW: Doors

‘Doors’ builds itself out of a catchy synth ostinato which creates a backdrop for Dickson vocal layers to soar alongside Zoh Amba’s visceral saxophone, Lesley Mok’s patient, yet dynamic drumming, and Lex Korten’s blooming piano. The lyrics speak to themes of cycling through life as Dickson explains: “I was challenging myself to stay in a loop for a long time and that's also what the song is about: feeling like you're in a circular pattern in your life.”

“I've been working on this album for about three years and its creation was a very detailed, intricate, and multi-phase process,” explains Dickson. “While I was making the album, this conceptualization of my process as emergent and embodied started to come together. This means that all the elements of the track are born in moments of improvisation and then refined and threaded together, eventually, slowly emerging as songs.”
The resulting songs became “little homes” for Dickson’s voice and lyrics. “I felt that the delivery of the lyrics and the way that I recorded them was going to be very important. I ended up in a process of recording vocals where I would wake up at the crack of dawn and would record the vocals when I was in this dreamlike state. I used airplane earbuds for tracking so that I could only hear the produced tracks as these really low-fi shapes of the tracks. I couldn't really hear what was going on even—and that was working really well. I was really happy with the takes I was getting and that made me observe that what I'm listening to when I'm making the music is a really big part of how the music comes out.” This process of selective-hearing while tracking became the central pillar for production and recording of Balance, a process she later dubbed as “bones and flesh.”
During a marathon series of 30 minute recording slots, Dickson broke down her tracks into three categories: “Bones” (rhythm and structure), “flesh” (ambient and harmonic layers), and her vocals which were then presented to the musicians with different combinations of these layers while asking them to “be a protagonist in the music they were hearing.” Dickson later took these recordings and threaded them into the existing song worlds of Balance.
In 2024, Dickson's recording was interrupted by a fire in her Brooklyn apartment, but Shahzad Ismaily generously invited her to treat his studio, Figure8, as a recording residency which allowed her to call a handful of young musicians who are at the forefront of creative music in Brooklyn to perform on Balance. Such collaborators included Lex Korten, Lesley Mok, Zoh Amba, Cleek Schrey, Kitba, Maya Keren, and Jon Starks.
She explains, “having the studio space gave me the option to bring in other people from my community to play on the album. This was a really amazing opportunity for me to bring my Producer Self into contact with other musicians and I worked with them the same way that I worked with myself in that it's an improvising practice where curating what you hear around you is part of the creative process. Listening literally becomes instrumental.”
The process becomes the message for Dickson, and on Balance we hear themes of order and chaos dancing circles around each other. Dickson’s daily encounters with her songs allowed her to develop a sense of perspective as she looked at her songs from a vantage point over the days and months that it took to fully develop them.
The title track opens the record with a bold choice to introduce large pockets of silence within the opening phrases. Dickson was inspired by a technique she calls “tunneling” that she noticed while reading Clarice Lispecto’s The Passion According to G.H., in which the author “unpacks her sentences. She'll be describing something, and then take out a magnifying glass and go way deeper into this detail of the previous sentence that you didn't even think was relevant. It's sort of this tunneling she does where she's just unwrapping and unwrapping words and ideas.” Dickson took this approach to developing her lyrics, ultimately leading to a song about “looking inward for the answer versus trying to find something external.”
The electronic world on ‘Sign’ was the first thing Dickson worked on for Balance. The song explores a recurring theme on the record to break out of long lived cycles into new spaces. “Waterfeel is the comfort song on the album,” explains Dickson. “It represents this safe, close, comforting feeling. That's also why it's in the middle of the album. It's protected by the other tracks.” The exposed vocal and ASMR textures that bloom in this song world are framed by a sneaky 13 beat synth sequence which falls in and out of our perception as Dickson draws the listener’s attention to other sounds in the world.
The infinite upward spiral of ‘Stair’ explores questions found in love: “How far will I go outside of what I know? How long will I stay?” Through these questions, the music blossoms with Dickson’s hyper detailed production. Small pings, string plucks, bird sounds, and melodic fragments create a tapestry for Dickson's dreamlike world building.
What began as an exploration of the Velvet Hand Phenomenon (a tactile illusion where rubbing your palms across two parallel moving wires makes one feel a smooth, velvety, or even oily surface) became a platform for Dickson to express her bold production choices. ‘Hurt Me’ is framed by an infectious drum groove while Dickson’s lyrical fragments explore themes of vulnerability and hurt: “this question of trust and truth comes up again. It comes up at the end with the idea that those things can be hurtful. That the truth can be hurtful.”
‘Eyelid’ closes the album as a “conclusion to all of these ideas: being intense and vital, playing the game of life, going in circles and returning to where I found comfort before, and finally to ‘white hot feeling, does it exist?’ So it's sort of giving up and then being moved for one last push.”

Tracklist
1. Balance
2. Doors
3. Sign
4. Waterfeel
5. Stair
6. Hurt Me
7. Eyelid
Credits
All songs composed, produced, and sung by Claire Dickson with additional performances by:
Zoh Amba, tenor sax (tracks 1,2)
Lesley Mok, drums (tracks 1,2)
Cleek Schrey, violin (tracks 4, 5, 7)
Lex Korten, piano (tracks 1, 2, 3)
Maya Keren, piano (tracks 4, 5, 6, 7)
Jon Starks, drums (tracks 5, 6, 7)
Kitba, harp (tracks 4, 5)

Recorded by Claire Dickson with additional recording and engineering support from Figure 8 Recording
and Varun Jhunjhunwalla.
Mixing and mastering by Lee Meadvin
Cover photography by Aaron Eidman of an artwork by Nina Blass.
Many thanks to Lee, Varun, Shahzad, Tommy, Zoh, Lesley, Cleek, Lex, Jon, Maya, Rebecca, Nina,
Aaron, Eden, Grey, Henry, Gabriel, Tyrone, Jason, Camila, Eli, James, Cassie, Nicki, Jan, Karenly, Judd,
Bill, Sarah, Milva, Glenn, and Aloe, who all helped make this work possible.

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