Ivy Knight’s Debut Album Borrows Its Name From a Data Center

Ivy Knight’s first full-length arrives with a title that sounds like it was lifted from a remote peak. In fact, ‘The Mountain’ is the real name of a data center, a detail that says a lot about how the Brooklyn songwriter sees the world. The nine-track album is out now, a collection of spectral bedroom folk that rarely stays inside the lines of the genre.

Much of the record’s imagery grew out of Knight’s senior thesis on data centers and their climate consequences. She wrote several songs while deep in that research, absorbing the contrast between heavy infrastructure and open land. Those picture don’t dominate the lyrics but they leave a residue, a sense of something unnatural sitting on top of something vast. Producer Deer Park, a former classmate who has become a steady collaborator, helped turn that scattered material into a single listen. “Some songs were written years apart, and so didn’t feel quite as cohesive,” Knight says, “but that was where we started to be able to weave things in to create more of a through-line.”

Knight also found her way to John Ford westerns during the process. She says she only recently developed the patience for film. The influence shows up less in twang than in a certain wide-open stillness and a willingness to let a moment breathe. Lyrically, she pushed herself toward a more decisive voice. “I was really interested in writing from a more empowered perspective this time around,” she notes. “More hopeful than passive.”

Next month Knight opens a string of US and Canada dates for Mark William Lewis. She calls the prospect of bringing the songs to a crowd “terrified and excited,” two things that can probably coexist on a stage just fine.