Kristin Hersh

A guitar at nine, a band at fifteen

Kristin Hersh was born Martha Kristin Hersh in Atlanta on 7 August 1966 and was six when the family moved to Newport, Rhode Island. Her father, a professor at Salve Regina University, gave her a guitar when she was nine. In 1981, while she and her childhood friend Tanya Donelly were high-school freshmen, the two started Throwing Muses.

Britain took to the band before America did. By the middle of the 1980s Throwing Muses were the first American group signed to the London label 4AD, and their self-titled debut album appeared in 1986. Hersh still treats that record as a dividing line in the band's history: she has described their 2025 album as a return to the way the group sounded before it came out.

Three outlets for the same writing

Hersh has run a solo catalogue alongside the band since Hips and Makers in 1994, followed by Strange Angels in 1998, Sunny Border Blue in 2001, Learn to Sing Like a Star in 2007, Wyatt at the Coyote Palace in 2016, Possible Dust Clouds in 2018 and Clear Pond Road in 2023. The third strand is 50FootWave, the loud trio she set up in the mid-2000s after the Muses' drummer David Narcizo could no longer tour full-time.

Throwing Muses have not stopped either. Their eleventh studio album, Moonlight Concessions, came out on Fire Records on 14 March 2025, recorded at Stable Sound in Portsmouth, Rhode Island with Narcizo, bassist Bernard Georges and the cellist Pete Harvey. It drew a Metacritic average of 79, four stars from the Guardian, which heard "a dark, parched ambience", and eight out of ten from Uncut, which found the band "growing no less peculiar and wondrous". Hersh wrote much of it while travelling through the American South, the Gulf coast, New Orleans and southern California.

Books, and a label of her own making

The writing has spread well beyond songs. Rat Girl, her account of the year the Muses got started, was published in 2010; Don't Suck, Don't Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt followed in 2015; Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood in 2021; and The Future of Songwriting in 2024.

The business side matters to how the records reach listeners. In 2007 Hersh co-founded CASH Music with Donita Sparks of L7, a subscription platform built to move music from musician to listener without the usual intermediaries. Since 2018 her releases have come out through Fire Records, which now handles both the band and the solo work.

The new record

Sugar on Blackstone was released by Fire on 18 September 2026, self-produced and cut at Stable Sound. Hersh plays guitar, bass, piano, mellotron and bits of percussion; Rob Ahlers of 50FootWave adds drums and Pete Harvey cello. The eleven tracks run from Dark Eyed Junco, Moths, Ticking, Silver Beach, Pink Nightgowns and 101 Run on the first side to Sundial, Snow White Lies, Dom In Orange, '72 Stingray and Samson on the second.

The setting is the Providence neighbourhood of her adolescence, which she now lives in again, across from the park where she played as a child. She has talked about staying out shooting baskets with her brother until after dark to keep out of their stepfather's way, and about the city's geography of money — most people she knew living off Hope Street while the wealth sat elsewhere. Running through the songs is her friend Domonick Knight, who died in a police standoff in 2025 and who gives Dom In Orange its title. Hersh has long held that songs use the writer rather than the reverse, and that the writer should stay invisible; she says it was engineer Steve Rizzo who talked her into letting Knight's presence into the recordings and treating him as a collaborator.

Reviews have been strong. Spectrum Culture scored it 89 per cent on 22 September 2026, describing "bright darkness" and a guitar sound that is "big, often dark, swathed in reverb and with a corrosive, distorted edge" without tipping into 50FootWave volume; the review singles out Ticking, a waltz-time song written after a funeral, and Dom In Orange as a lament carried by Harvey's cello. Uncut's line, used on the record's promotion, has Hersh "at the top of her considerable game".

Where things stand in 2026

The year has split into two kinds of touring. In April, Throwing Muses played a short run of Northern California dates — their first Bay Area appearance in twelve years. At The Chapel in San Francisco on 17 April the band delivered 23 songs, 21 in the main set and two more as an encore, with Hersh working through a cold and Harvey's cello set against her guitar; the run also took in Santa Cruz, Sacramento and a second San Francisco night on 20 April.

The autumn belongs to the solo record. The European leg opened at All Saints Church in Birmingham on 26 September and runs nightly, almost without a day off, through Bedford, Leicester, Oxford, Cambridge, two nights at St Michael's in Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh, two nights at The Cluny in Newcastle, Belfast, and a long loop around Ireland via Dundalk, Sligo, Kilkenny, Galway and Cork, then Glasgow, Hebden Bridge, Leek, York, Bristol, Marlborough, Exeter, Cardiff and Brighton, before three consecutive nights at The Lexington in London on 23, 24 and 25 October. Belgium, the Netherlands and Paris follow, with Ramsgate on 31 October and Dublin's Pavilion Theatre on 1 November. Australia and New Zealand come next: Frankston, Melbourne and Sydney in mid-November, then Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, and four New Zealand dates from Dunedin on 28 November to Wellington on 5 December.

How the shows are booked

The venue choices tell most of the story. Rather than a handful of city-centre rooms, the tour is built out of churches, arts centres, small theatres and back rooms: All Saints in Birmingham, the Holywell Music Room in Oxford, St Peter's Church in Marlborough, Cottiers Theatre in Glasgow, the National Centre for Early Music in York, St George's Church in Ramsgate. Capacities are low enough that London needed three nights and both Manchester and Newcastle two, and Bristol's Folk House date on 18 October added a 4pm matinee alongside the evening show.