“Experimental, queer, and kind of magical” – Eileen Myles to The Guardian

TRAИƧA is a concept album in eight chapters, built as an intentional sonic experience of compassion and liberation.

Red Hot released TRAИƧA the album November 22, 2024; the project continues with live interpretations of the songs and new recordings in progress.

With contributions from the most daring, imaginative trans and non-binary artists working today, TRAИƧA softens the edges of the world we know, and invokes powerful dreams of the futures that might one day thunder from its cracks.

Across 46 tracks, TRAИƧA the concept album reunites generations of trans and gender non-conforming artists who carved spaces of possibility before awareness of trans identity permeated mainstream consciousness. Moses Sumney, Sam Smith, and Lyra Pramuk pay moving tribute to the late disco icon Sylvester with a cover of his most indelible single, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real).” Over pastures of guitar, harp, and violin, Beverly Glenn-Copeland and Sam Smith duet on a stunning new recording of Glenn-Copeland’s song “Ever New,” originally released as the opening track to his seminal 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies. Jayne County, a pillar of New York punk, teams with Laura Jane Grace of Against Me!, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Kathi Wilcox of Bikini Kill, and Jay Dee Daugherty of the Patti Smith Group for a new recording of her raucous trans anthem “Surrender Your Gender.” Together with Wendy and Lisa of the Revolution, London-based singer Lauren Auder covers Prince’s iconic track “I Would Die 4 U,” a monument to gender transcendence.

That this Greek chorus of 100+ artists inspired movement across genre is no coincidence. Where Sade’s pop ballad for her trans son Izaak acts like a guardian angel of the collection, originals on the album shaped by artists at the forefront of experimentation like Niecy Blues, Joy Guidry, Ahya Simone and Teddy Geiger reach into noise and a kind of neo-classical mysticism. To listen is to consider transness as a quality beyond fixed identity and a path toward survival.

The passing of SOPHIE, the pathbreaking electronic producer who died in January 2021, galvanized the producers and focused their work. “We started talking about all the gifts that trans artists have been giving to the world, and wanted to create a Red Hot project that centered and celebrated those gifts,” says Reid. “We hoped to create a narrative that positions trans and non-binary people as leaders in our society insofar as the deep inner work they do to affirm who they are in our current climate. We felt this is something everybody should do. Whether you identify as trans or non-binary or otherwise, if you took the time to explore your gender, get in touch with the feeling side of yourself, maybe we would have a future oriented around values of community, collaboration, care, and healing.”

Bell and Reid began conceiving of the album as a spiritual journey in eight chapters, a mirror of the original eight-stripe rainbow pride flag. The narrative begins at the earliest awareness of consciousness; moves through awakening, trauma, and grief; and arrives at liberation and continual reinvention. “One thing trans people do all the time is turn grief into possibility,” says Bell. “Living under the ongoing Western binary system, trans people reveal maps of possibility for everyone. It’s something that we can all learn from – expanding the possibility of human life.”

Read more at redhot.org/project/transa/