Some instruments carry baggage. The harp, for centuries, has been locked into its celestial stereotype: angelic plucks, courtly refinement, the sonic equivalent of gilded wallpaper. Enter Kety Fusco, who doesn’t just reject that framing, she sets it on fire, dunks it underwater, and drags it back out dripping with new possibilities. Her second studio album BOHÈME isn’t a collection of songs, it’s a sonic uprising.

Nine tracks, every sound sourced from the harp, yet nothing sounding like the harp you think you know. Fusco prepares it like a piano with wax, hairpins, and sticky tape. She records it submerged in a pool until its resonance fractures into alien textures. She manipulates it electronically until it mutates into percussion, drone, and distortion. And then she throws it back at you with elegance, ferocity, and zero apologies.

The single “SHE”, a collaboration with the eternal outlaw Iggy Pop, has already been hammered on BBC 6 Music. It isn’t just a co-sign, it’s a confirmation: Fusco belongs in the same canon of musicians who rewire tradition into something unruly and alive. The track works because it’s a hinge — opening the door for listeners who might never wander into avant-garde harp experimentation, yet find themselves pulled into its orbit by sheer gravity.

But BOHÈME’s pulse beats strongest in its experiments. “Resistance” is exactly that: an act of sonic defiance, the harp made metallic and industrial, its delicacy warped into tension. “Nocturne” teases familiarity, beginning with gentler tones before dissolving into something spectral, bowed, and uncanny. “Für Therese”, Fusco’s radical restoration of a forgotten name erased from Beethoven’s history, twists the cultural relic of Für Elise into something feral and breathing. It’s reclamation through distortion, a refusal to let history flatten individuality.

This is where Fusco thrives: between tradition and rupture, between the recognizable and the unclassifiable. There are moments that alienate, yes, but that’s the point. Accessibility isn’t the goal. Freedom is. Every track on BOHÈME carries that manifesto.

Fusco’s trajectory proves this isn’t a one-off experiment. She has carried the harp from the Royal Albert Hall to the Montreux Jazz Festival, from the United Nations to sweaty festival stages. She composes soundtracks, radio themes, and juries Eurovision, then returns with a record that makes the harp sound like it’s clawing through water and wood. And in 2025, she takes this mission further, selected for the International Visitor Leadership Program of the U.S. Department of State, placing her at the cultural table with institutions like the GRAMMY Museum and the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz.

All of this makes BOHÈME more than an album. It’s an assertion: that beauty doesn’t come from preserving instruments in glass cases, but from breaking them open, dragging them through mud and pool water, testing what else they can say. Fusco invites us to stop fetishizing tradition and start listening to what happens when it’s dismantled.

So did you think you knew the harp? In Fusco’s hands, it’s not an ornament, it’s a weapon. And BOHÈME is the sound of it finally being fired.