I was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine and grew up in the suburbs of Massachusetts. I never sang in public until I moved to Austin, Texas where I started playing in the doorway of an abandoned bar near the corner of 6th and Congress. My music is about people that bring you to the brink of joy and despair and about having epiphanies in the most ordinary places. THE NEW YORKER: Alina Simone, a Ukrainian-born singer with a potent and ethereal voice, writes wistful songs laced with spare guitar playing that have a Cat Power-like quality. MAGNET: The six songs on this beautiful debut obsess over capturing minute physical details. sulfur lights glare down on a romance as it unfolds in a parked car (“Louisiana Song”), and white church spires pierce the sky behind the local pawnshop where lovers converge (“Cash America Pawn”). The instrumentation — spare guitar and cello with minimal drums — leaves Simone’s aching Rebecca Gates-meets-Chan Marshall voice exposed and vulnerable. PITCHFORK: Simone rejects the generically folksy strum that keeps many talented singers stuck on the coffee-shop circuit, choosing instead to wrap her smoldering voice around dark, fractured arrangements that tremble on the verge of vanishing entirely