NEW YORK CITY, NY — September 2026 — Most artists release a record and then figure out what comes next. Kelly Padrick already knows. Her new EP Butterflies landed this month, and by January 2027 she will be in Montreal filming the video for “Shine,” the twelfth cinematic short she has made with director Patricia Chica.
That kind of continuity is the through-line of Padrick’s career. The indie pop and country-pop singer, songwriter and actress has been writing music since she was five years old, first in Rhode Island and later in New York City, where she is now based. What began as a childhood habit hardened into a recognisable signature: hazy, dream-pop harmonies layered under songwriting that refuses to settle into one lane, and a storytelling instinct that keeps the emotion legible even when the production turns atmospheric.
Butterflies, produced by Marc Copely, leans into the nostalgic end of that range. It arrives as the latest entry in a discography that stretches back two decades, beginning with Haze in 2005 and continuing through Carmine Street (2007), Hello My Love (2009), Soulmate (2011), The Kind of Girl (2013), Dear Love (2014) and It’s Only Me / On the Line (2016). Scattered between the albums are projects and singles including Fires, The Real Me, “I’ll Try” and “Shine” — a body of work substantial enough that Butterflies reads less like a debut statement and more like a writer returning to familiar territory with sharper tools.
Screen work has shadowed the music for years. Padrick’s songs have appeared in ABC’s Desperate Housewives, HBO’s VICE and the Fox Searchlight feature Trust the Man, placements that speak to how easily her sound sits underneath a picture. There is a cinematic quality baked into the writing, which may explain why the visual side of her catalogue has grown as ambitious as the audio.
Chica has directed eleven of Padrick’s music videos to date, among them “Waiting for This” and the award-winning “Heavenly Ride.” It is an unusually long creative marriage by industry standards, and one that has let the two build a shared visual vocabulary rather than starting from scratch each time. The “Shine” shoot will test that partnership again in a new city, on a track pulled from the new EP.
Taken together, Butterflies and the forthcoming “Shine” video suggest an artist less interested in reinvention than in refinement — still circling the emotional and atmospheric qualities that have defined her work since the beginning, and still building the pictures to go with them.
