Grace Cummings Gives Herself to the World on Thundering New Album Bloodhorse!
By : Josh Kitchen / August 14, 2026
Much has already been said about Grace Cummings’s voice—and, in this author’s opinion, you could never cease in the attempt, because no earthly word could ever do it justice. The only way I can begin to make sense of it is to declare it tempestuous—a hurricane, a monsoon, some kind of calamitous and biblical act of God. When you look at Grace Cummings, it’s not a voice you might expect, but like the childhood Grace growing up in Melbourne, Australia, she is full of mystery and wonder. When asked what might be causing her night terrors as a child, she had only one answer: “witches”—something she tries to make sense of on “WITCH! WITCH! WITCH!,” a highlight of her third album, Bloodhorse!, out today.
Like her 2024 album, Ramona, on Bloodhorse!, Cummings once again invites us to take a peek behind the curtain of who she really is—or at least at the version of herself she is performing for us now. One of Cummings’s many talents is stage acting, and that comes as no surprise when you see her onstage, often prowling and gesticulating with wide eyes and body movements that would make Lindsay Kemp proud. “That’s what life feels like to me. I love theater because life is a comedy and a tragedy. It’s the same fucking formula,” Cummings tells me in a discussion about the album.
Comedy and tragedy abound on Bloodhorse!, as do feelings of pain and the ways we yearn to treat it, starting with the thunderous “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Morphine” that opens the record. Right out of the gate, Cummings is belting her heart out, inviting us into an epic the size of the Grand Canyon, beginning with a trudging ballad that recalls Led Zeppelin’s version of “When the Levee Breaks.” But while Zeppelin might have summoned the God of thunder, Cummings commands the very heavens—rarely coming back to earth, and when she does, on tracks like “Paradise” or “My Island and Me,” we’re treated to breathers in an epic that refuses to let you go until the very end.
While Cummings contends with parts of her past and the pain she’s felt from how the world sees her, tracks like “My God” and the title track exemplify one of Cummings’s great gifts: the frenetic forward momentum that she teased us with on her Western odyssey, “Common Man” from Ramona. Each of these songs feels like a different speed on a stallion, sung by a woman who could never and would never stop, no matter what gets thrown her way.
It’s a breathtaking record, and one that only Grace Cummings could have made, thankfully once again assisted by the Topanga Canyon sorcerer himself, Jonathan Wilson, who returns after producing Ramona. “If you’ve got the real privilege of being able to do what I was able to do—to go to Topanga Canyon, to work with Jonathan [Wilson] again, who I fucking love, and get the best players that are there—why would I do anything with the block?,” she tells me.
On Bloodhorse!, Cummings makes peace with the child she once was and with all the ways the world around her tried to make her into something she wasn’t. What remains is the realization that the only thing she can give is herself. “What the world doesn’t already have, even if it’s an opinion, is not yours. The only thing you can give it is you,” she tells me. And when I ask what she would tell that child version of herself, she is as direct and unflinching as the gift that is her voice: “I would tell her that you have something to give to the world and to other people, and your courage, generosity and kindness will make you better. There’s nothing wrong with you—and you’re not special either.”
This record opens with some of the most massive, thundering, stomping sounds on “The Hills Are Alive With the Sound of Morphine.” My jaw dropped. I love your previous album, Ramona - I love it so much, but when I heard this song, I was like, “Oh, this is a serious fucking record.” I hear Aaron Copland, “White Elephant” by Nick Cave, Zeppelin's “When the Levee Breaks.”
Grace:
I love "White Elephant."
"Morphine" has that same thundering, propulsive momentum. It’s so forward-moving, and I think that defines a lot of your work, especially on this record. This is music that goes and doesn’t stop—and in those moments where it does, it meets you and gives you a second to breathe before it keeps going. There’s something incredibly alive about that push and pull. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about that idea of the music being so full of life.
Grace:
Full of life and massive. Look, I have come to a point in my life—and I love what I've done in the past as well, and they're little marks in time. We all live in fragments of time - today is going to be cut up into fragments for me.
I like to think about life, and sometimes I absolutely have to think about life, like it is the weather. There are a lot of haters—I don't know where the fuck they come from—on the internet that are like, "Will this fucking chick stop talking about the storms and the weather and fucking God and whatever?" No, I won't, because it's one of the big things.
This record, I just went, you know what? I have this opportunity, and I am going to take it. Without sounding like a wanker, I want to take it with courage.
Over the last little while, I guess after Ramona, in the last couple of years, I've gone through a not-easy process, but a very valuable process, of really figuring out who you are—or were—and getting over that grief, and then being that person again, kind of unapologetically. If you've got the real privilege of being able to do what I was able to do—to go to Topanga Canyon, to work with Jonathan [Wilson] again, who I fucking love, and get the best players that are there—why would I do anything with the block?
Yeah.
Grace:
The things that move me about the world are big things, uncomfortable things. I see the whole world theatrically. It's not really something that I put on to perform, even though it seems like it. That is actually what I'm like, and it makes my day-to-day life quite difficult. But to be able to express that in any kind of way is amazing. I would say this to any musician or any artist or any whatever:
"What the world doesn't already have, even if it's an opinion, is not yours. The only thing you can give it is you."
Grace:
So I was like, "Fuck it. That's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna be myself, and I'm going to express things the way they feel to me." But I love that you like "White Elephant." I recently met Nick Cave for the first time, and it was a wonderful experience. I told him that I cried. Public weeping is something that I've just given myself to. It's fantastic, and you should try it.
I've seen Nick Cave about a dozen times. Trust me, I've been there.
Grace:
And that song, I was just like, "Get out of town." But I told him later I had been bawling my eyes out, and he was like, "What song was it?" And I said, "Joy." He held my hand and looked into my eyes and said, "Yeah, I know. You're gonna be okay." And I was like...."Yeah, thanks."
You just finished a European tour with Father John Misty, how was that?
Grace:
It was great. It was a short tour, just a handful of shows that were really great. The audiences that Josh has are absolutely wonderful and beautiful, and I think, without sounding whatever, kind of a really good match for me as well, because they're so willing to listen to everything. Josh is a very literary, dramatic person who has so much dynamic and so much subtlety, and the audiences are really open to that kind of stuff.
So it was really great to play in front of them, and they were really beautiful audiences because, I tell you what, they showed up. It was pouring with fucking rain for two of those shows in the middle of the forest, and everyone was just there. I was talking to Josh before Miles and I went on, and he looked out and was like, "People are waiting there. We're not Radiohead. What are you doing? Radiohead aren't here." And I was like, "I know."
I played one of my favorite shows in Antwerp, which was in the middle of the forest. They kind of go on rain, hail or shine. For our show, we thankfully were mostly under cover because I'm playing with Miles, who plays the theremin, which is essentially invisible electromagnetic fields, and there was a tempest—thundering, rolling thunder cracks and lightning.
There could have been three people in the audience and I wouldn't have given a fuck because it was just the most amazing experience. It was like the thunder was a part of the music. My tiny little soul was so fed by that. I was just like, "This is fucking amazing."
I said to Miles, "We're putting storms on the rider now." He was like, "Bitch, I'm playing the fucking theremin!"
"It'd be a good way to go. And he was like, "Nah, you're right. It'd be a great way to go."
There are so many feelings of shame, loss of innocence, love and life on this record. One of my favorite ways you talk about that is in "John Lennon." He's one of the first voices you cling to when you start getting into them because he's so clever. You're talking about the things you miss and hearing and growing up, and there's a line where you say you still miss "childhood grace."
Grace:
It's a prescriptive name. I have difficulty with my name a lot. I don't really like it. The idea of grace as a concept I like very, very much.
And then on "Bloodhorse!," there's that feeling of propulsion we mentioned earlier. This is a song I hear and I'm going to fall off my horse. You do this with "Common Man" off the last record as well. Evoking these feelings of freedom and looking out on the horizon.
Grace:
I recently changed the lyrics to "Common Man," and the audiences are struggling with it a little bit, but I won't change them back. I changed "I am a cowboy" to "I am a coward."
You talked about how you live theatrically, and I know you were an actor, and in some ways I'm sure you still feel like you are one. Like on "My God," you sing "Could you paint a masterpiece, fill it with sound and fury?" As someone who is so used to theater and presenting yourself as you are, I feel like you couldn't be you without that kind of visceral intensity behind you. I feel like that's something that comes across really well on this record.
Grace:
Thank you. Ever since I was a little kid, I've obviously loved music, just in every way. But the thing about acting to me—a lot of people talk to me about it overlapping with how I perform, and the same kinds of questions come up when I'm in a rehearsal room for the theater, or when I was at drama school.
People would ask me, "How come you can do this? What kind of process do you go through to get your character to do this onstage?" The classic one is crying, which is not the point, guys. The point is feeling and giving it to someone else.
But anyway, I digress. I kind of think that if you are given something that means something to you—if it's a script with a particular character saying a particular thing to another person and being affected by it—you're going to respond if you're open.
I think it's the same kind of thing with music. If you go in with no worry about being ugly—the real definition of ugly—if you go in with no kind of block, you naturally are affected and respond to what the music is and what the words are.
So I think that when I can see effort, or when I know that I'm thinking about the effort to achieve something, I don't think I'm doing it. In fact, I know I'm doing it wrong. It's the same with acting.
"That's what life feels like to me. I love theater because life is a comedy and a tragedy. It's the same fucking formula. It really, really is, and that's the way that I deal with it."
To Borrow from your song, "John Lennon," what would you tell "childhood Grace" if you could tell her something now?
Grace:
I would tell her that there is nothing wrong with her. I would tell her that you have something to give to the world and to other people, and your courage, generosity and kindness will make you better. There's nothing wrong with you—and you're not special either.
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