For Charlotte Greve, WATERBODIES is less a statement of stylistic identity than an invitation into the full breadth of her musical world. Produced by Grammy-nominated Shahzad Ismaily, the forthcoming album brings together an expansive cast of collaborators, including the New York-based vocal ensemble KHORIKOS and the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra, while reflecting Greve’s own history as a sought-after sidewoman for artists such as Chris Morrissey, Laura Veirs, Cass McCombs, Cassandra Jenkins and Matt Pavolka.
Rather than pursuing a single sound, WATERBODIES deliberately moves in multiple directions. Spoken word sits alongside full orchestral arrangements, improvised jazz gives way to synth-pop, intimate ballads coexist with expansive compositions, and the record eventually settles into a serene, arpeggiated closing track. The result is an album unified not by genre, but by Greve’s instinct to follow her curiosity wherever it leads.
That openness also makes the record deeply personal. Greve wrote WATERBODIES while pregnant with her daughter and first child, capturing a particularly transformative period in her life. Not long after discovering she was pregnant, a friend encouraged her to record the music before the baby arrived. The suggestion became the spark for a project that might otherwise have remained unrealized.
The circumstances surrounding the album were anything but conventional. Greve was preparing for motherhood while investing her own money into a record she knew was unlikely to fit neatly into a commercial mold. Yet that tension became part of the album’s purpose. Rather than shaping the music around a marketable identity, she chose to make something guided by personal necessity.
“This is the most holistic representation of my musical interests,” Greve says. “I wanted it to feel like a playground — the opposite of an easy-to-sell, career-minded, one-kind-of-thing record.”
That sense of play is central to WATERBODIES. Its songs function as distinct pieces while belonging to the same larger world, allowing contrasting musical languages to sit beside one another without being forced into uniformity. For Greve, the connection comes naturally because each influence passes through the same creative perspective.
“It captures the full range of what I’ve been drawn to musically,” she explains. “Rather than narrowing things down, I wanted to open them up, placing these disparate influences side by side and trusting their connection would come through because they’re all channeled through me.”
The album’s first glimpse comes with “Lighter Blue,” offering an introduction to a project that embraces contrast as a strength rather than a problem to solve. Across WATERBODIES, Greve allows each musical idea room to exist on its own terms, creating a record that feels exploratory, intimate and unrestrained.
To mark the release, Greve will take the album to New York’s Public Records on October 14 for a special joint album release show featuring a performance by Kaoru Watanabe. WATERBODIES arrives October 2 via New Amsterdam, marking the release of a project that Greve describes not as a calculated career move, but as something she simply felt compelled to make.
In that sense, WATERBODIES feels like a document of creative freedom: a record born from a moment of profound personal change and built around the belief that music does not always need to make conventional sense. Sometimes, it simply needs to be honest.
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