Kristin Hersh

Martha Kristin Hersh was fourteen when she started Throwing Muses, the Rhode Island band that became the first American act signed to Britain's 4AD label. Across more than four decades she has built three bodies of work at once: the shifting-tempo, surreal-lyric rock of the Muses, the abrasive power-trio noise of 50 Foot Wave, and a solo catalog that began with 1994's acoustic Hips and Makers and now runs past eleven albums. Her songs follow a stream-of-consciousness logic, and her guitar moves between jagged dissonance and plain folk without warning. Years before crowdfunding had a name, she was financing records directly through her listeners, an independence she has never traded away. An author as well as a musician, she wrote the memoir Rat Girl and continues to put out work that treats personal history as raw material rather than confession. Her latest, Sugar on Blackstone, returns to the streets of her Providence childhood and arrives in 2026.