Ziemba’s New Album ‘The Braid’ Was Written While Reporting on the U.S. Immigration System

Ziemba, the project of musician and writer René Kladzyk, will return with a new album this fall. The Braid, out October 2 via self-release, is her first full-length since 2020’s True Romantic.

The opening track, “The Pleasure Seekers,” is out now. Kladzyk has said the song took shape after a man in a Montana bar told her about lessons learned from a bad acid trip. At the time, she was confronting her own patterns of escapism and addiction. “The fantasy that, maybe this is what I was brought here to do, maybe all my excesses have a celestial justification — it held a real allure for me, delusional as it was,” she explains. On Instagram, she describes the track as “the sonic version of sprinting through the pouring rain with total abandon, tits out.”

The album was written and recorded while Kladzyk worked full-time as a reporter covering the U.S. immigration system and the Department of Defense—a context that sharpens the album’s tension between discipline and release. It features contributions from Andrew Macguire, Don Godwin, Will Segerstrom, Marta Honer, Ben Babbitt, and others.

The Braid is out October 2. Pre-orders are available now.