Sister Mary Margaret’s “Proud Mary”
After a summer of striking visuals and artistic collaborations, Sister Mary Margaret is ready to release her debut album Proud Mary, a project that blurs the boundaries between classical discipline, experimental sound, and raw self-exploration.
Recently selected for the New York Foundation for the Arts, Sister Mary Margaret continues to assert herself as one of Brooklyn’s most fearless emerging voices. Proud Mary is not just a debut. It is a declaration.
It is an album about contradictions, collisions, and catharsis. Proof that in dissonance, there is harmony.
Sister Mary Margaret is a classically trained musician and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. She wrote, arranged, performed, and produced the entire album herself. Rooted in her upbringing in Buffalo, New York, Proud Mary reflects the tension between her rust belt origins and the artistic energy of her life in the city. The result is a soundscape where lush harmonies and digital ambience collide, creating something melancholy yet transcendent, industrial yet spiritual.
Her background in opera and classical performance deeply informs the work. A graduate of the Purchase Conservatory of Music, she appeared as Blanche in Dialogues des Carmélites and made her European debut as Mary Warren in The Crucible at the Berlin Opernfest. Yet Proud Mary feels worlds away from the rigid boundaries of the conservatory. It is a reclamation of voice and vulnerability, an embrace of the dissonance that defines her.
“Much of my creation is centered around the concept of duality,” she explains. “Opposites exist within us and outside us without cancelling each other out.”
This is the cover artwork drawn in colored pencil by Acacia.
That philosophy runs throughout the record. Songs like “Zeus Freestyle” and “Two Moons” explore the push and pull of identity, the suspension between opposing emotional forces. Through deep lyrical writing, often drawn from her own poems and essays, she examines how power, gender, and spirituality intertwine in modern life.
Her production is raw, organic and vocal are rich with emotion, which she later expands with digital textures, industrial noise, and layered synths. The result feels intimate yet expansive, like a diary written inside a cathedral.
Sister Mary Margaret’s work also speaks directly to the queer femme experience and critiques of patriarchal systems. Through symbolic references such as the Hanged Man tarot card in “Two Moons,” she invokes both mysticism and resistance, exploring how femininity, vulnerability, and rage coexist. Her songs grapple with themes of sexual violence, loss, and reclamation, while never losing sight of the transcendent beauty in survival.
