Hurray for the Riff Raff

Alynda Segarra had been a human embodiment of Newton’s First Law of Motion even before they ran away from their home in the Bronx at age seventeen, illegally hopping freight trains and hitchhiking across the country in the company of a band of street urchins, sleeping rough under dense underbrush at night and hiding in trees for shelter. Coming from a fractured family, they weren’t quite sure what they were looking for, but they had the feeling they would know it when they found it. And they did when they pulled into New Orleans in 2007. There, Segarra formed two bands: Dead Man’s Street Orchestra and Hurray for the Riff Raff, releasing an EP and seven albums with the latter, including, It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You (2008), My Dearest Darkest Neighbor (2013), and The Navigator (2017). On her most emotionally intense album yet, Life on Earth (2022), Segarra constructs an alternative reality—or, in their words after their recent temporary escape from New Orleans because of Hurricane Ida, “a soundtrack to evacuation.”