PLEASE NOTE: This review appears in the print version of Buscadero magazine - March 2026. 

There's a deep scar running through the heart of Pennsylvania, made of earth plowed by bullets and bones never full\y buried. Gettysburg, July 1863, three days of carnage, fifty thousand souls mowed down on golden wheat fields. It is from this rift in space and time that Queen Esther emerges with Blackbirding, an album that doesn't simply play history but interrogates it with th analytical ferocity of a detective at a crime scene. The daughter of The Lowcountry of South Carolina and raised amid the contrasts of Atlanta, the artist forged this work during a residency at Gettysburg Military Park in 2020. It was not a peaceful spiritual retreat. Esther walked for a month among the monuments and memories of the battlefield, piecing together fragments of diaries and maps. While the world outside stopped due to the pandemic, she remained trapped in 1863, filtering the horrors of the Civil War through the lens of the present. The album lifts the veil on blackbirding, the lucrative system of kidnapping free Blacks in North America to be resold as cattle on Southern plantations. While Generals Lee and Mead clashed over the fate of the nation, Confederate soldiers combed the streets of Gettysburg to hunt down Black residents, dragging them in chains behind enemy lines.

For Esther, this manhunt has never known an armistice. The disc traces a straight line connecting the patrols of the 19th century to today's ICE agents -- the federal anti-immigration agency transformed into a sort of private militia at the service of Donald Trump's most repressive policies -- suggesting that America's fratricidal conflict has never ended. The cover itself conceals a hidden iconography. Inspired by Barkley Hendricks portrait Lawdy Mama (1969) Esther poses with hieratic elegance in front of a golden arch reminiscent of medieval alterpieces. Yet, it is the background color that whispers the truth: haint blue, the pale blue of Gullah Geechee traditions -- the Afro-descendant communities of the East Coast of the United States -- created to confuse malicious spirits by making them believe that they are in front of a body of water. It is a spiritual armor, a protective shield for the legacy of Mitocondrial Eve, the ancestral African mother from whom we all descend.

The sonic framework of Blackbirding is as essential as it is sharp. The beating heart is Hilliard Green's double bass, which supports the songs with the solemn cadence of a military march. On this carpet are grafted the acoustic guitars of Jeff McLaughlin, dry and percussive, and the reverberations of the pedal and lap steel of Raphael McGregor, which evoke the fog on the battlefields. The sequence of the 12 songs is concieved as a descent into the underworld of American consciousness. Opening with Are You Thirsty, a vivid sketch from the perspective of vivandieres, the women who followed the regiments and despensed wine as the only anesthetic against terror amidst the fumes of Beaujolais, Esther introduces us to a world where intoxication is the last defense before the abyss. Breathing then becomes labored in Can't No Grave Hold My Body Down, a military march slowed to an exhausted heartbeat. Here, the constant percussion and trumpet calls evoke the Taps, the ordinance silence for the fallen, transforming a spiritual lament into a promise of metaphysical insurrection. The need to resist becomes a physical imperative in Hold Steady, where a punchy electric solo tears through the acoustic fabric, warning us not to give ground just when the boundary between beginning and end becomes blurred. The emotional center of gravity shifts with The Devil May Care (But Jesus Knows), an avant-garde rock theater that explores the survivor's paranoia. On a minor arpeggio, Esther's voice becomes confessional (I feel like a missed bullet), while hope in God appears as the only way out of an imposed evil. The political narrative becomes explicit in Hey Virginia! a country-folk ballad that parodies the genre's carefree attitude, launching an attack in the heart of the Confederacy. With Richmond as its capital and Jefferson Davis' government on the ropes, the slave state par excellence is here invited to a desperate escape (Run Virginian). This is the moment when history presents its reckoning: the iron gate of the South collapses under the weight of its own atrocities. The recovery of roots delves into the cotton fields with I Feel So Alive and When I Get Home, so that transfigure plantation work songs into modern blues prayers. Here, pedal steel and electric guitar weave visceral dialogues, celebrating the dignity of work and the desire for a return home free from chains. Light filters timidly between the stars of Oh My Stars, a nocturnal ballad on spiritual resilience followed by the militant warning of Rebels, an anthem to physical and intellectual struggle. If Magic is an ephphany of hope for the future, the album finds its political catharsis in Home Free, which draws the definitive parallel: There is no peace if the house is not safe, if the systemic racism continues to operate as a federal nightmare.

The finale, entrusted to You're Gonna Get What's Coming, closes the circle with strumming guitar by a Lucinda Williams in the key of black and a scratchy voice, and the final verdict on the choices of a nation that has not still finished bleeding. Queen Esther models a living matter in which she intertwines alt-country, jazz, soul and R&B, dirtying the story with spirituals, pop echoes and gospel roots. A journey through time, permeated by pain and from hope, which reminds us that ignoring the past means condemning ourselves to an incomprehensible present.  -- Sofia Virginia Raccio