Since the early 2010s, Brazilian-American artist Samira Winter has been cultivating a cult following for her singular take on ethereal shoegaze. She spent her formative years growing up in Curitiba, Brazil, where her mother filled their home with the gentle melodies of MPB (música popular brasileira), and her father introduced her to the distorted sounds of American punk. After moving to Boston for college, she eventually relocated to Los Angeles, where she carved a distinct lane for herself in the city’s thriving underground. Initially pulling influence from classic dream pop and 90’s indie, Winter’s sound quickly coalesced into something uniquely her own, developing a brand of make-believe, fairy tale surrealism that sets her apart from her contemporaries.
There’s a duality to …and she’s still listening that mimics the interplay between the conscious and subconscious, occupying the twilight space as night transitions into morning. It’s a catalog of her own emotional journey, on trusting intuition and making space to hear one's inner voice, loosely following the semi-fictional journey of a girl who travels through the ‘dark forest’. The four tracks came to life during a nomadic period, as Winter bounced between London, Vermont, New York, and Los Angeles. The title is inspired by the Russian fairy tale Vasilisa, where a young girl finds her freedom by listening to a doll gifted by her late mother, freeing herself from the clutches of evil and escaping the enchanted forest. “On a personal level, I felt like I had to conquer things within myself and reach a place of my own inner freedom in order to complete this EP and have the courage to put it out,” Winter shares.
On …and she’s still listening, Winter takes us another step deeper into the world she’s been constructing, where what’s imagined can be just as enlightening as the real.