Charlotte Carpenter

Between 2014-2019 East Midland’s singer-songwriter Charlotte Carpenter made her name by releasing a series of heavily championed EPs. Her raw, soulful song writing was widely heralded with comparisons to the likes of Cream, Cat Power, Bonnie Raitt, and PJ Harvey, and coverage garnered from tastemakers from The Line of Best Fit through to rock bible Classic Rock, with support from BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 2 and Virgin Radio, and UK-wide tours alongside (among others) Marika Hackman, George Ezra, Liz Lawrence, Eliza Shaddad, Ralph Pelleymounter (To Kill A King), Get Cape Wear Cape Fly, and Matthew Logan Vasquez (Delta Spirit).

In 2020, Charlotte set out to make her debut album. The following years saw a period of stagnation, frustration and crippling self-doubt caused by a domineering, autocratic male producer, one who was emotionally abusive and who created a toxic, stifling work environment. “I stopped listening to my own instincts and I handed over creative control” explains Charlotte “I was scared of him.”

This experience is told in Charlotte’s debut album A Modern Rage (6th October 2023), a record Charlotte re-wrote and re-recorded after parting ways with the producer. After a period of rebuilding her dismantled confidence, she excelled in the expansive creative freedom previously denied to her.

“The journey to this album has been long, and in some cases, I’ve had to go backwards to land into the place I am today. I already had a handful of the songs in my pocket, and without realising at the time, I was expressing my anger in an array of colours and sounds and sharing my confusion of what it means to me - to be a woman” explains Charlotte. “I wanted to be unapologetically at the front and centre of every song, without anybody telling me to be quieter. Without anyone’s opinions but my own I learnt more about music than I had in a long time. I learned that I loved it.”

A Modern Rage is a zeitgeist record dropping at a time when women’s stories are finally not only being told but listened to and understood. One born out of a deeply traumatic personal experience but one that takes the resulting rage and frustration and pours it into a blisteringly cathartic record exploring the male dominated power structures within the music industry, and society as whole, that hold women back. It is the sound of an artist previously silenced finally expressing herself fully “I would hear uncomfortable stories about other women and stand in silence, I didn’t yet have the vocabulary or confidence as I do now to express why something was wrong” expands Charlotte.

A Modern Rage is also, a record that unpacks how life’s profound experiences are navigated – in Charlotte’s case, loss, love, addiction, mental health, and more recently a pandemic - within the often claustrophobic and pressurised confines of life as a woman.

With newfound expressive freedom each song on A Modern Rage has its own distinctive voice, representing a different aspect of Charlotte’s experience but also her personality. It’s an album that cradles nostalgia with the present day, paying homage to Charlotte’s favourite singer-songwriters and bands of the 70s and 00s in one place, from Elvis to Avril Lavigne, The Killers to Sheryl Crow, accounting for her deft ability to cross genres of rock, pop, blues with subtly country twangs and moments of old soul.