Check out the new single from Tenderness, the solo musical project of Katy Beth Young. Over the gently tuneful guitar, layered synths, Harry Bohay’s pedal steel and lightly insistent percussion, Young’s vocal performance on ‘The Salt Flats’ is outstanding. Her voice has a rich, timeless quality – pure and deeply melodic – and it rises up beautifully on heavenly backing. Lyrically, the song is open-hearted and sensitive: “One week of silence // And one day of talking with our hands // One good night’s sleep // And a whole summer of other plans.”
Tenderness says of the song: “‘The Salt Flats’ is a song about trying to hold onto good moments, and how impossible that is. Joy, peace, adoration, they’re all very slippery emotions. The song lives in the moment of gentle panic – the good feeling, already leaving. We tried to build that into the music through the synths and the rhythms – a pulling forwards and backwards at once. A kind of nostalgia. I finished writing the song in my friend Martha Rose’s apartment in Berlin, so it was really perfect that she and my friend Benjamin Gregory could do the backing vocals – their voices are the melancholy cherry on top.”
The single is taken from the upcoming debut album “True”, which is due out on Amorphous Sounds on 13th March 2026. The songs explore the blurred lines between fantasy and fiction, between romance and the real world. She explains: “We perform love in the same way that we perform love songs. And when you sing, performing makes the emotions real again. That’s why ‘True’ became the album title. It’s all true, I think.”
A challenging sequence of events led to the Tenderness project. During the pandemic, furloughed and with time to spare, Young found herself mourning the loss of her father, dealing with a cancelled tour and navigating a break-up. She managed to channel all her conflicting feelings and experiences into her music. She says: “I was having a hard old time, but it was also strangely beautiful. There’s something about that space of grief that is very tender. There was a lot of sadness, but also a sweetness and openness to the world. You feel things deeply, but you’re also gentle with people.” Here, in ‘The Salt Flats’, there is, indeed, tenderness. Enjoy.
