Outspoken Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor will release her tenth studio album I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss on Aug. 12 via Nettwerk Records.
Featuring 12 new tracks, the album is already earning quite a bit of buzz thanks to the cover art, which features a glamorous O’Connor wearing a short, blunt black wig and embracing a Gretsch G5265 Jet Baritone axe.
“I was aware if I were to produce a couple of photo wherein I had hair, everybody would run them and would have to mention the album title,” she explained in a recent interview with Yahoo. “They weren’t done originally for the album cover. They were supposed to be fun publicity shots that would get some publicity and someone would mention the name of the record, and it f–king worked.”
It’s a bit of a surprising move, since O’Connor shaved her head early in her career after pressure from her record label to look and dress a certain way.
“I’ve never said that women shouldn’t dress like women; what I’ve said is that you don’t have to be naked on a wrecking ball and licking a sledge hammer,” she explained to Yahoo. “You can be very, very sexy without actually taking any of your clothes off or twerking. That’s what I’m interested in showing and when you look at the shot, that’s what you see. There’s nothing in those photographs but a little leg showing, but here you have a hot women, which isn’t actually me — it is me, but I don’t really look like that. I’m not going to go around trying to look like that.”
The album’s first single “Take Me To Church” can be sampled below.