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Singer Cold Specks in a handout image.

"I guess it's a dark album," says Al Spx, the deep soul singer who calls herself Cold Specks. "It was always going to be that way."

The 24-year-old artist from Etobicoke, Ont., made a whopping impression when she appeared last year on the BBC's Later...With Jools Holland and, more recently, when she toured with the American singer-songwriter Anne Clark (aka St. Vincent).

Her new album, I Predict a Graceful Expulsion, is due out on May 22, on the Arts & Crafts label. She appears in Toronto during Canadian Music Week on March 22, at the Music Gallery.

The album's first single, Winter Solstice, is a graceful, stirring sort of field holler, concerning mortality and the passing of torches to a younger generation. Spx names Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Sam Cooke as influences. "Doom soul is how describe my music to people," she says. "It seems to make sense to them."

Listen for yourself: The Globe and Mail hosts the exclusive Canadian debut of Winter Solstice, a new song from a new artist.

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