Luce Mawdsley scores three-track EP for a Catherine Opie documentary

Liverpool-based indie musician Luce Mawdsley has composed a new three-track EP, Dream, Baby Butch, for a documentary about the artist Catherine Opie, with proceeds going to Liverpool LGBTQ+ charity Sahir. The EP arrives September 4 via Pure O Records, with lead track "Triptych" already out.

The record was written for Catherine Opie: Moments of Being, a film commissioned by the National Galleries of Scotland to accompany Catherine Opie: To Be Seen, Opie's first solo exhibition in Scotland, running at the Royal Scottish Academy through November 1. The EP's own artwork borrows Opie's 1970 photograph Self-Portrait.

Mawdsley, who is non-binary, said the commission felt daunting at first. "Opie's work is a devotion to representation, the story of people who are made to feel they do not belong," they said, adding that they felt at home in a world where that kind of divergence read as possibility rather than exclusion.

Mawdsley recorded the EP with pedal steel, an instrument they call "surely the most nonbinary queer coded western instrument," alongside synthesizers and percussion from Michael Paul Metcalfe. On "Triptych," a title nodding to Opie's Self-Portrait photographs and their echo of Christian iconography, Mawdsley said the pedal steel "mutates into an angelic church organ sound" partway through the track, "as worlds, and timelines collide."

Dream, Baby Butch follows Mawdsley's debut album, Northwest & Nebulous, with a follow-up already being finalized for 2027. Mawdsley will perform the new material live at Chats Palace in London with Marisa Anderson on September 4, and at Chapter in Cardiff with William Tyler on September 6, tying the EP's release to a short run of UK dates and adding another release to the release calendar.