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Elly Kace’s voice is a complex instrument. Hushed and spectral; swelling and shiny and muscular; rattling with static-electricity intensity; whirring like bare branches in a wicked storm; resolving into a crystalline cure. Its capacity is seemingly boundless. Its core quality is, above all, alive.

“I’ve been singing longer than I’ve been speaking,” Kace says, quietly cheerful. 

By age six, Kace performed in her first professional choir. While childhood classmates did their imagining with magic wands, Kace waved a conductor’s baton, her musical aspirations preceding puberty. She pursued opportunities in voice, musical theater, and recording, completing her first full-length album during her senior year of high school—with the help of Garageband. Kace enrolled at DePaul University in Chicago to study Operatic Vocal Performance, a conservatory-style endeavor requiring intense commitment. “Opera is the kind of thing that, if you want to do it well, you can’t do much of anything else.” Her diligence secured more than a degree. Kace embarked upon a vibrant career in opera, performing across the globe and at esteemed cultural institutions such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, culminating in a pivotal European audition tour. In Milan, Kace found herself on the cusp of a professional and personal peak. That was January of 2020.

“I had to leave before the lockdown,” Kace says, the tone of her voice falling with the memory’s lingering weight. She returned to New York on the first of March. Uncertainty mounted—about what she’d left behind, and about what she was coming home to. Public performance, the focus of Kace’s life up to that point, had just become unsafe.  

For plentiful reasons, Kace began meditating. She had been an avid yogi since she was a teenager—“Opera is athletic work,” she says, “You have to stay in shape”—but she hadn’t so deeply explored the mental elements of her practice. The general purpose of meditation is to quiet the mind, but cerebral silence can beget a visceral sound. Kace began experiencing instinctual vocal expressions, involuntary incantations that she recalls felt “strange and unnerving and really, really good.” Her relationship to her voice had historically been a matter of control, a training as rigid as one undergoes to operate a particular tool. The skills she’d acquired were measured and specific and diametrically opposed to improvisation. “It was just happening, sounds coming from nowhere,” she says. “I started letting my voice do what it wanted to do, instead of what I told it to do.” While fellow quarantiners sought out sourdough starters and puppy dogs, Kace acquired a harmonium and many singing bowls.  

Kace fondly refers to her first album as an “experiment.” She says, “I’d only ever been in opera. The idea of making music I could play in, say, a bar, felt wild.” She released ‘Nothing I see means anything’ in 2021, and from then, her urge to write only intensified. In that time, Kace endured the deaths of several loved ones, and her approach to sound evolved into a form of not only expression, but of grieving and healing too. “It became a way to connect with those I had lost,” she says. Just one year after her debut, Kace released ‘Object Permanence,’ a stunning, sonic transcendence of realms. 

Kace approached her third album with burgeoning confidence and a welcome, new certainty that she was doing what she was meant to do. As studios and venues cautiously reopened, Kace could finally engage a flesh-and-blood music community. She speaks of the band that came together, Macie Stewart (FINOM), Darian Donovan Thomas (Arooj Aftab), Will Miller (Resavoir), Lia Kohl, Aaron Edgcomb (CLAK), as well as her co-producer Ziyad Asrar (Whitney), with a reverent gratitude. “Making music that’s so different from what I studied for so many years—it’s hard, really hard,” Kace confesses. “But it is so satisfying.” 

‘The Seventh Gate’ is an extension of ‘Object Permanence.’ While that album delved boldly into the dark depths of the spiritual world, ‘The Seventh Gate’ steps into the light. Kace is audibly more comfortable with the music she’s making as well as those meditative conversations with the other side that inspire it.

The album opens with “Lisianthuses,” titled in reference to Kace’s favorite flower, a species that is notoriously difficult to grow. “I have always been told I was a handful, and have spent much of my life trying to be less so,” Kace explains. “I have realized the things that make me a handful are the things that connect me to my higher self. I am working to become more and more of a handful each day, and when I need reminding I buy myself some lisianthuses to gaze at.” It’s through this radical declaration of self-love that Kace can fully embrace her distinct mysticism, a cosmic openness that colors every song.  

Truths unfold on “Moon,” an eerie and enthralling confrontation with mortality. Kace illuminates the temporariness of existence with a radiant severity. Like a fairy godmother in a graveyard, she sends her tense melody spinning. She says, “Everything changes on the physical plane, everyone leaves, and ultimately our bodies all die. There is a sacred humility in recognizing our physical limits and the vast space of what we don’t know beyond the things we can sense.” For the sickening fear of endings, Kace prescribes the medicine of life itself.   

Two songs on the album, “Even With The Light On” and “Pink Sky” came to Kace simultaneously in the middle of the night. “I found myself waking at three in the morning, sensing the explosive presence of a former love who’d passed,” she explains. “No matter the spells I cast, the lights I keep lit, some souls are tethered to my existence.” In both songs, Kace offers a tender but adamant farewell, gracious and intentional about honoring her own needs, taking care to move forward.  This profound balance underlies the entirety of ‘The Seventh Gate,’ the willingness to acknowledge the mysteries that surround us, and the courage to do so with agency. 

“I want people to feel safe,” Kace says. “To be themselves. To have had all the connections that they’ve had. It’s okay. To live from vulnerability. To be open to the unknown.”

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