Across the selected works on As It Was Given, recorded between 2020-2024, God’s Mom expands on the short bursts of dancefloor energy from their previous EP with a more panoramic and nuanced expression. Inspired by vocal traditions rooted in her Italian heritage, Salmena packs the album full of mantras, fiery assertions, and personal confessions, often explicitly regarding womanhood. Studying the polyphonic singing in Calabrese tarantella’s, documented in recordings from the 1930’s-60s, she found that songs sung by these women from her family’s native region were especially haunting: “in almost every track it was clear that singing was the purest form of expression, singing to release energy, pass the time, mourn the dead, and even happy songs are almost unlistenable at times. They sound far more raw than any punk singer I had ever heard”.
Salmena’s urge to draw on her ancestral connection with these traditions became God’s Mom’s foundation, “in order to understand why I need to express myself musically in certain ways”, she says. “The voices of these women in the recordings were the only things that could not be silenced by extreme religious and gendered oppression, and in some way, I felt I could give a voice to the women in my lineage whose only value was seen in childbearing and serving men. God’s Mom’s performance and styling are not hedonism for the sake of hedonism, it’s a reckoning”.
Salmena, who releases her solo music via Sub Pop/Royal Mountain started working with Matthews (Dime Lifters) on the selected works that is As It Was Given in 2020, following several years of intensive touring with her band FRIGS and as a member of Orville Peck’s band. Between 2020-2024, they created the varied pallet of God’s Mom’s sound, which is laden with hooks, blown-out bass, and reckless genre jumping. Moving from rave anthems to moments that feel like some forgotten 80s Vogue classic or even a melodramatic wedding song from the Calabrian coast, the album switches footing fearlessly. It presents very much like a club that has different styles of music for different rooms, depending on whether you want to come up or come down.
The album carries a shadowy undercurrent that often rattles like an exorcism but can also appear hymnal and celebrates the power and beauty of community. The cacophonous group vocals that haunt the record are the connecting thread, with Salmena singing in chorale with these ghosts of the past in harmony and admiration. As It Was Given is new body music that channels an old-world spirit.