The Ultimate Hurray for the Riff Raff Primer

Dear listeners,

Last week, I published a profile of the 36-year-old singer-songwriter Alynda Segarra, who makes spirited and defiant music under the name Hurray for the Riff Raff.* Their ninth LP, “The Past Is Still Alive,” comes out today, and though 2024 is still young, it’s an early contender for my favorite album of the year.

Yes, I did say ninth album, which means that Segarra has quite the back catalog. Today’s playlist can serve either as an introduction to Hurray for the Riff Raff or, if you’re already familiar with them, a mix that places their new songs in rich conversation with what’s come before.

Segarra grew up in the Bronx and left home just after turning 17, eventually ending up busking in a street band in New Orleans and riding freight trains during the hottest Louisiana months. Playing in communal spaces and collaborating with other musicians, they developed a repertoire of Appalachian folk, Delta blues and classic country, with the requisite Tom Waits song thrown in.

By 2014, on the breakout album “Small Town Heroes,” Segarra had found their own unique voice as a songwriter who was able to adapt traditional forms to speak to present concerns. This playlist’s leadoff track, “The Body Electric,” is a perfect example: Sparsely arranged and sung with conviction, it is a kind of revisionist murder ballad that questions that genre’s history of violence against marginalized people. “He shot her down, he put her body in the river,” Segarra sings of the doomed Delia Green, before offering a line that would come to define the political motivation of subsequent HFRR albums: “He covered her up, but I went to get her.”

Over the past decade, Segarra has released a consistently strong run of albums that update traditional folk music to consider modern scourges like gentrification (on the epic 2017 album “The Navigator”) and climate change (on the elegiac 2022 release “Life on Earth”).

But “The Past Is Still Alive” is something else: a memoir, a travelogue, a loose campfire singalong. These songs have the sort of direct, plain-spoken confidence that comes with age. On “The Navigator,” Segarra created a protagonist named Navina and built a whole alternate universe in order to tell a story that had parallels to their own. Here, Segarra is narrating their own experiences, etching their own story into the American songbook, and asserting that they belong there.