{blackbabes} Santigold goes for broke on new album '99 Cents'

 

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Santigold isn't the kind of artist who easily fits in a box — or a plastic bag, for that matter.

On the cover of her third album, 99 Cents (out Friday), the genre-bending pop singer imagines herself as dollar-store knickknack: stone-faced and shrink-wrapped with a colorful assortment of odds and ends. The stark imagery plays into the larger themes of her new music, which satirizes commercialism, consumption and people's incessant need to market themselves online.

"The era that we're living in is absurd in so many ways: the selfies, Instagrams and people who are so much about capturing these moments, rather than experiencing them," says Santi White, 39, who goes by stage name Santigold. "I decided to take that absurdity and make fun of it."

After touring in support of her 2012 album Master of My Make-Believe, Santigold decided to take some time off from music, during which she dabbled in acting (The Office, Adult Swim), launched a makeup collection (with Smashbox Cosmetics), and gave birth to a son, Radek, in spring 2014 (with her husband, snowboarder Trevor Andrew). Two months later, she was back in the studio.

"I went in there and was like, 'I'm going to have a fun time,' " Santigold says. After "I had a baby, I had this ball of joy at home that was like the most beautiful, pure energy. It ended up being this brighter, playful record, partly because I willed it to be and partly because that was the influence I had in my life at the moment."

 

Santigold approached 99 Cents with the desire to create big pop songs that draw from eclectic influences, including African music, reggae and punk rock. Working for the first time with artists and producers such as ILoveMakonnen, Hit-Boy and Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij, she says the album is her freest and most well-rounded yet, mixing droll and danceable songs with darker, heavier tracks.

Chasing Shadows, a plinky piano anthem, is about ambition and the inability to live in the moment "because you're always trying to put on this facade and look for what's next." Meanwhile, crackling synth ballad Run the Races describes the choice to "play the game and talk the language in order for people to hear you sometimes. That was a conscious decision for me, because it's not natural for me to put myself on display all the time and act like everything's perfect."

Although Santigold is active on Twitter and Instagram, she mostly uses them to share new music or retweet fans — not exactly the #SquadGoals group shots or aw-worthy #ThrowbackThursdays we've come to expect from Top 40s reigning queens.

For a while, "I tried to pretend that (social media) wasn't important, but for a musician, you need to do it," Santigold says. "It's one of the main ways of marketing your work, but it's under this weird guise of being natural and real, and it's totally not. ... When I'm at home being a mom, barely sleeping and not having time to shower, it's really hard for me to keep putting up these Instagrams for everybody to see and pretend I'm doing so much fun stuff."

After this week's release, Santigold will take 99 Cents out on a nearly two-month North American tour, kicking off in Houston March 21. In addition to TV appearances and album promotion, "I have a lot of art to finish, which is fun for me," she says. "I've got a lot of things I'm trying to do, but I'm just trying to stay afloat, really. It's a lot."

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