Alysia Kraft

Alysia’s Kraft’s sophomore release, Electric Blooms (October 2023) is a hard-hitting, hook-laden batch of indie rock that balances warmth, quirk, play, and catharsis in equal parts. Voted as the 2023 Colorado Sound winner for Outstanding Live Performance, Kraft’s a supernova of the Northern Colorado music scene, an indomitable front-person who is a punk-kinetic, pop cathartic, and a fierce conductor of collective energy. Performing and collaborating with a trio supergroup comprised of Shane Zweygardt on drums (Dead Pioneers, Wire Faces) and Oliver Mueller on bass (Slow Caves), and dips into sonic territory drawing comparisons to Amyl and the Sniffers, Bully, Broncho, and Wet Leg while carving out a sonic space urgently and energetically their own.

Kraft and drummer/co-producer/energy-twin Shane Zweygardt took turns producing and engineering the Electric Blooms in the dimly lit after-hours of The Music District - a space in which they both worked day jobs that involved supporting other local musicians through access to high quality gear and programming.

“I was writing constantly and eager to develop more sustainable ways to make records. When we started, we didn’t know if we were going for demos or finished songs…but we were bottling these songs in the time they were being lived and felt, experimenting and trusting instinct. It helps to have Grammy-nominated mixing engineers (Andrew Berlin and Jason Livermore) finishing your work.”

Kraft’s solo debut First Light (sonaBLAST!, June 2022) charted third on Colorado radio in 2022 (alongside giants The Lumineers and Nathaniel Raitliff), won Best Original Song from the LA International Independent Film Festival, and earned Kraft one of nine inaugural Sonic Guild Grants in Colorado. The Colorado Playlist nominated First Light for a 2022 best album, and Kraft was named a NIVA Artist to Watch in 2023 and won the Colorado Sound Award’s Outstanding Live Performer in 2023. Before launching a solo(ish) career, Kraft built devoted followings for projects Whippoorwill and The Patti Fiasco and has shared stages with icons ranging from Bon Jovi, to Blondie, to Bonnie Raitt, to Big Thief. Kraft is a rare songwriter who can hush a crowd with an intimate solo set or bring fervor to a packed stadium. While First Light balanced lush folk and shimmery pop, Electric Blooms is all indie fuzz fireworks and premonitions of punk. It’s Kraft wielding the electric guitar as an expressive tool as freely as her high kicks and clearly having the most fun yet.

The title track launches listeners through a surrealistic energy-scape of new connection and pollination with flirtatious and coy wordplay; “Offering” lands somewhere between the 90’s grunge-dreaminess of the Cranberries and the pop-astute indie rock of Snail Mail and Soccer Mommy, kicking down doors in the opening bars before surrendering into the light of a new, gigantic love; “Killer Bees” buzzes with the memory of love that packs a sting; and “Little Fire,” a song Kraft penned as “the simplest and most loving life advice” she could condense for her four-year-old niece, smolders steadily until a climax of sonic fireworks and the mantra “follow your heart, keep it wild, build your own little fire” takes willing listeners to the side of transformation. The album’s most virtuosic emotionality comes from “3 Empty Chambers” an homage to the determined but devastated exodus from a ten-year-relationship that accelerates and intensifies until the “break” that Kraft has been begging for lyrically cracks the song open on itself. Contemporaries like Bully, Broncho, Snail Mail & Waxahatchee exist alongside classic references to the Breeders, Cranberries and the Cars.

Co-produced and co-engineered by Kraft and Zweygardt and featuring contributions from Oliver Mueller (Slow Caves), Jesse Bates (Quiet Life) and Hayden Farr (The Burroughs, Trash Cat), the album was mixed and mastered by Grammy-nominated engineer Andrew Berlin and Jason Livermore at the legendary Blasting Room Studio in Fort Collins, CO.

*ALYSIA KRAFT*

Alysia Kraft (she/they) grew up on a small family-run cattle ranch in Wyoming and graduated from from a K-12 school with eleven classmates she’d mostly known since toddlerdom. At the time, Kraft was a determined visual artist and a freakishly good basketball player who earned a Division 1 full-ride despite her (small but scrappy) stature. Beginning her music career at 22 with a very grassroots determination to bring music places it didn’t already exist, Alysia built devoted followings for projects The Patti Fiasco and Whippoorwill, and later toured and shared stages with a spectrum of icons from Bon Jovi, to Blondie to Bonnie Raitt to Big Thief. She released seven regionally-acclaimed independent records before being signed to sonaBLAST! for her 2022 solo debut, First Light. A fiercely community-oriented artist, Kraft is a prolific collaborator, producer, educator, and advocate for the queer, sober, and artist communities of Colorado.