After a decade of releasing music as POESY, the singer-songwriter is saying goodbye to the name and introducing herself as Serra Marinheiro.
And there’s one final song connecting the two.
cataracts is officially the final release from POESY while also marking the beginning of Serra Marinheiro, a change that has been coming as she increasingly felt that the identity she’d created no longer represented who she was.
Over the years, small compromises had gradually added up and POESY began to feel more like a disguise than herself. Serra gives her the opportunity to change that, embracing the confidence and determination she’s found along the way without hiding the more vulnerable parts either.
“This music is the anger in my gums and the moment I finally dared to stick around long enough to say to someone, ‘You see me’,” she explains. “POESY was a girl afraid to disturb the universe, Serra Marinheiro is the woman ready to let you hear the scream.”
The new name couldn’t be much more personal.
Serra is the Portuguese village her family comes from, while Marinheiro takes its name from her grandfather’s restaurant, itself named in tribute to sailors from the local area.
And cataracts feels like an appropriate place to draw the line between what came before and what happens next.
Built around sparse piano production and Serra’s powerful vocal, the song deals with those moments where trying desperately to remain positive can stop you from seeing a situation for what it really is.
“I wrote cataracts for anyone who’s ever been painfully blind to a situation because they were too busy forcing themselves to see the glass half full,” she says.
“That’s why it felt like the perfect final word from POESY – to finally close this chapter of doubting myself. It’s humbling to know the older you get, the more you realise there’s so much you still have to learn.”
She wrote and produced the track alongside Matt Ingram, whose previous credits include Florence + The Machine and Laura Marling.
It closes a ten-year period that included Soldier of Love and the Glass Box Confessional EP released through Big Machine Records, but Serra isn’t walking away from the music itself.
There’s already more new music to come under the Serra Marinheiro name.
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