Step into Candi Carpenter’s world and conventional boundaries quickly disappear. Music becomes film. Songs become characters. Religious history becomes mythology. A garbage dump becomes a stage. A zombie apocalypse becomes a metaphor for modern life. With Reincarnation, Carpenter is building more than an EP. They are creating an entire artistic universe where the strange and the serious can exist side by side.
The project follows Carpenter’s 2024 alt-pop debut Demonology and represents an even more expansive creative direction. The six tracks move across different genres while exploring mortality, capitalism, fear, simulation, sexuality, religion, and rebellion. Each song is designed to represent a different side of Carpenter, meaning that the project constantly changes shape without losing its central emotional thread.
That thread is transformation. Carpenter’s understanding of reincarnation is rooted in the idea that people are continually becoming someone else. Every day, parts of the body die and regenerate, and the same process can be applied metaphorically to identity. For an artist who has moved from gospel to country to alt-pop and now alt-rock, the concept feels especially personal.
The visuals take that philosophy and make it physical. Carpenter and their friends built a trash dump inside a warehouse and filmed the project over the course of a week. The resulting short film connects all six songs into a present-day apocalypse filled with zombies, decay, bright colors, and deliberately obvious symbolism. Carpenter’s description of the visual aesthetic as a “filthy rainbow” captures its mixture of ugliness and beauty.
There is also a sense of playfulness underneath the darkness. Carpenter does not approach difficult subjects with the solemnity of someone trying to create a conventional prestige project. Instead, they embrace theatricality and absurdity. The result is a world where existential anxiety, religious deconstruction, sexuality, capitalism, and garbage can occupy the same frame. That willingness to be weird may be one of Carpenter’s greatest creative strengths.
Ultimately, the world of Reincarnation is a reflection of its creator. Carpenter has never fit neatly into one artistic category, and the new project does not attempt to force them into one. Their history informs the music, but it does not dictate where it can go next. By combining songwriting, performance, filmmaking, acting, and world-building, Carpenter has created a project that feels less like a career pivot and more like an artist finally making enough room for every version of themselves.
Find Candi Carpenter: Website, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Threads, Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Pandora, TIDAL
PR: Danielle Holian, Decent Music PR
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