“It’s true, it hurts to have a heart / and it hurts to feel my heart open again”

Contradiction and confluence. Singularity and totality. Break-up and renewal. On After the Sting of It, Kelly McMichael performs a wild yet precise balancing act in a constant process of redefinition, offering shifting perspectives emotionally and skipping genres musically for an album that’s always asking you to hold two ideas at once. With art-rock production flair that belies its humble processes, McMichael weaves unexpected sounds around her poignant, incisive words for a self-contained journey through the psyche. 

The follow-up to 2021’s hit Waves—for which McMichael received an East Coast Music Award, three Music NL Awards, and a spot on the Polaris Prize shortlist—builds on its classic-rock core and expands wildly into psychedelic synth, drum machines, and found sounds. Though Waves was her solo debut, McMichael is no novice, previously performing as Renders and in the bands of Sarah Harmer, The Burning Hell, and the Hidden Cameras.

The cover for After the Sting of It—a collage of polaroids, fabric, and pieces of a painting by McMichael’s grandmother Yolande Renders—offers an overture of what awaits on the vinyl inside: myriad moods and influences pulled together into coherence by a confident architect. The hot cinnamon red border holding it all in reflects its mood, angry and passionate. Like Waves it was recorded in McMichael’s adopted home of St. John’s, Newfoundland, also with the singer-songwriter Jake Nicoll, who also engineered and co-produced Waves. McMichael made much of Sting at home by herself; her debut’s success, she says, “gave me the confidence to be more playful.”

That sense of play, even while introducing the dissolution of a long-term relationship, is evident on the lead track, “You Got It Wrong,” with its laconic piano intro, layered vocals, and Nicoll’s kitchen field recordings. The full pauses, staccato claps, and call-and-response “no one has ever got it this wrong before” evoke a lost track from Fetch the Bolt Cutters. We slide straight into the lush, ’70s-era Fleetwood Mac-ian “Open,” with its grounding bassline and “witchy ethereal sounds,” as McMichael puts it , a melancholy dream in the wake of the jaunty late-night vibe of “You Got It Wrong.” She continues to hang out in the ’70s on the sax-laden “Dreamer,” with its refrain of “I’m still a dreamer” and keyboard melodies so cheerfully upbeat you almost believe her.

McMichael moves to the ’90s with Sheryl Crow aplomb on “All Over Again,” a wistful folk strummer that blossoms into an alt-country jam. Its chorus—“This comfort is just denial / your growth, my pain / He feels better after talking to some girls / I feel worse all over again”—”was haunting me for years,” she says, deeming it Sting’s best, most painful track. It is followed up by its angriest one, “Bomb”: “She’s blowing and there’s nowhere for it to go.” 

The B-side of Sting, the softer one, kicks off with a gentle but tentative ballad, “Too Soon to Tell,” with its warning refrain of “smells like love” (but’s too soon to tell).  She moves into major synth territory with “Standing Out,” an anthem for misfits. “Doing things differently is a superpower, and I get to celebrate that here,” says McMichael. “It’s not easy being a weirdo.” The breathy, slow-moving new-love paean “Fog” sounds like what Enya would make after emerging from her castle (“I wanted to make a really nice soundscape that felt like you were floating through the clouds”) while the slow-burning “The Ballad of Moody Green” displays kaleidoscopic guitars over a bright-yet-foreboding cymbal and bass solo as airy vocal layers slide in and out around them. “Nature Man” describes someone who fantasizes about fleeing the drudgery of the everyday for a quiet existence living off the land.

The album closes out with an epic punk banger not about love nor lack of it, but something that contains all feelings: touring. “Everything’s expensive but we’re built to spill, and it’s gotta happen,” laments McMichael on “Tour From Hell,” which details the illness-ridden, mechanically cursed run of her Waves release tour, in what should have been a celebratory post-Polaris wake. “It was great until everything broke down,” she says.

After the Sting of It is impressive in its emotional duality and unconcerned about fitting into any particular genre, music that sits in the comfort of its core ideas while being utterly unafraid to try new things. It plays exactly how its maker intended. “I write and record in a way that you’re just giving the song what it needs,” says McMichael. “Why limit the creativity? I don’t want limitations.”