This is what you get when an emcee/producer is fed on a diet of abstract hip-hop, Southeast Asian samples, and Taoist folklore.
Together with the Clementi Sound Appreciation Club (a five-piece band of up-and-coming musicians schooled in jazz from the local scene in Singapore), Mary Sue melts samples with live instrumentation on 'Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword.' At the core of the album is the tale of a time-traveling oracle, struggling to find meaning in the modern world-where ancient wisdom feels fragile, and truth is ever-shifting.
A reinterpretation of idioms shapes its journey, where spiritual pursuits feel performative, and where the weight of the past clashes with an uncertain future.
The music mirrors this tension: phrases of Gamelan music dissolve into smoky brass, spectral melodies unravel over off-kilter drums, and time bends through layered textures.
'Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword' is both a reckoning and a dream, where echoes of the past find new life in the chaos of now.
A porcelain shield shatters on impact; a paper sword folds before it cuts. It's about the constant, fragile push-and-pull between aesthetics and money, tradition and progress, meaning and spectacle.
"Like the oracle, we're all stuck in a world where spiritual longing gets tangled up with consumerism, where authenticity is blurred by performance, and where finding real meaning feels shakier than ever," rapper and producer Mary Sue explains. "'Porcelain Shield, Paper Sword' lives in that field of tension. The album drifts between beauty and collapse, truth and illusion, and past and present, without ever landing on solid ground."
1. INTRO
2. ORACLE BONE SCRIPT
3. MOSQUITO
4. THIEF AND THE BELL
5. HORSE ACCUPUNCTURE (FT. AGUNG MANGO & NAKAMA.)
6. THE WELL
7. HASTE
8. INTERLUDE
9. DRAGON TAIL
10. MINESWEEPER
11. TIGER AND THE CEILING
12. SNAKE HEAD
13. CRABS
14. IRON BUTTERFLIES
15. GRACE
16. LIBATIONS/ROOTS