Ali Forrest Lands a Knockout with ‘Cagefighter’

Ali Forrest’s harrowing, compulsively catchy single “The Maze,” which dropped in October 2024, is the perfect teaser for her debut album Cagefighter, the much anticipated LP by the artist Queen City Nerve called the city’s Best New Singer-Songwriter in our 2024 Best in the Nest issue.

The accompanying video for “The Maze,” shot and directed by Josh Rob Thomas (Dipstick) at Ultimate Gym in Belmont, begins with an upbeat electronic riff that belies the tune’s emotional brutality. As Forrest stalks a dimly lit, well-worn gym, she delivers the tune’s poetic and devastating lyrics with a smoky yearning vocal accented with her subtle lilting yodel, a fluttering registration change between head and heart.

“You said I’m beautiful just long enough that I believed you/ Then you tore me down till I was desperate to please/ You’re just a pattern in a cycle that I keep repeating/ I only love the ones who smile while I bleed…”

Forrest dons boxing gloves and hits a punching bag — a central metaphor for the toxic relationship the song depicts. She connects with the bag on the drumbeat, signaling a segue to the song’s chorus: “I’m sick of the chase/ I’m sick of naively begging you to change/ If I ever escape this maze/ My self-respect will never be the same…”

Both song and video pack a visceral punch, climaxing with an emotional knockout: Forrest, looking exhausted, delivers her final words lying flat on her back in a boxing ring.

The combative tune depicts a psychic thread that runs through much of Forrest’s music, including her upcoming LP, which is set to drop Jan. 24.

“As a concept, Cagefighter is a visual representation of a way that I have lived my life,” Forrest says. “Going into every scenario … romantically, with my friends, even with the band, sometimes [I had] this idea that I’m bringing a deficit. When I was writing these songs, living my life, [I felt like] I had to do millions of things just to be on common ground with everybody.”

The album is a powerful and empowering journey, a real-life character arc for Forrest in which she struggles with feelings that she’s different and inadequate.

“The front half of the record is me coming to terms with [those feelings] through romantic context, and the back half explores acceptance and … evolving out of that survival mentality,” she offers.

The boys in the band

When it comes to setting her turbulent muse to music, Forrest has found reliable collaborators whom she fondly refers to as “the boys”: guitarist Ben Burrows; bassist, guitarist and engineer Cole Covington; drummer and engineer Caleb Whitlock; and guitarist Eric Maust.

And the boys are pros. Burrows also plays with Charlotte artists Joe May and Ethan Regan, Covington plays with musicians including Winston-Salem singer-songwriter William Hinson, Whitlock does production work and also plays with local artists including Regan while Maust records and releases original music under his name.

Like Ali Forrest, the band members draw on their backgrounds in folk rock and gospel, and they accompany Forrest’s inspired songwriting with precision and a sense of space. Although Forrest writes the tune’s lyrics, melody and chord changes, she says the contributions from the four experienced musicians are invaluable.

“Everyone who plays with me also wrote their parts on [Cagefighter],” Forrest notes, but “the boys” also offer her support and validation. “The men in this band are technically proficient, but they [also] create space for me, the girl in the band, to speak up and have opinions … I’m surrounded by feminist allies.”

The group’s friendship and collaboration are rather new. It was an Evening Muse show in April 2024 that brought them all together, though they didn’t know it at the time. Forrest played a solo set on what she calls “a $100 trash Ibanez acoustic guitar” that belonged to her father in high school.

“It’s the most magical thing in the world,” says Forrest, who still plays the guitar. “It sounds awesome.” One man’s “trash,” as they say.

All members of the current band happened to be in attendance. A few had played together previously, some had fleeting familiarity with each other, but all had huge respect for Forrest’s songwriting skills.

With the exception of Covington, who was on a skiing trip in Canada, all these players came together later that same month to record Forrest’s breakthrough five-song EP Body in the Plaza Midwood house where Forrest lived at the time. (Gabe McKinney handled bass duties for those sessions.)

Forrest had previously dropped the Raised Wrong EP, a collection of songs featuring Forrest on vocals, guitar, and Logic software, in summer 2023. Jacob Blizard, guitarist for alternative-rock artist Lucy Dacus, mixed the set.

Blizard has gone on to mix all of Forrest’s subsequent projects, including Cagefighter, for which he worked as lead producer. Whitlock and Covington did additional production while Forrest and Maust produced the album cut “The Alarm.”

For Body, Forrest and the band went for a live feel, trying to capture what the recording room sounded like, says Whitlock, who was engineer and lead producer on the EP.

“Each song is one take through, no click track, very minimal editing — just shooting for the most raw, live thing that we could,” Whitlock says.

Though the band had just 36 hours to track the EP, Forrest wouldn’t send demos of her songs to them prior to recording.

“I wanted them to write [the songs] live,” Forrest says. “They figured them out, and then we would just do our three takes, and then we would have to move on.”

Maust calls the results amazing, even though the band members never played with each other before.

“Everybody really listens [to each other],” Burrows says. “Nobody was stepping on each other’s toes. That speaks volumes to the musicianship that everyone carries with them from years of experience.”

“I feel like we built a lot of trust in each other after that,” says Forrest.

Another part of the Forrest

In late July and early August 2014, the band entered Greensboro studio 2eleven, where Whitlock had done previous production work, to record Cagefighter. This time, Covington was on board. Ali Forrest says the band took a half-and-half approach, recording some of the songs live on the floor like they did on Body, and shaping others, like the album’s title track, in the studio.

“The demo I brought [in] was with electric guitar, and the vocal was sent through a Logic guitar amp,” Forrest says. “[It] started weird and we were able to dial it up with everybody’s additions.”

The track kicks off with twanging spaghetti western guitar and Forrest’s electronically treated vocals tumbling in free fall.

“When you feel pain I splinter/ So I numb us till we’re dull/ But it’s not you that’s broken…”

Despite its combative-sounding title, “Cagefighter” represents a progression from “The Maze.” In contrast to that tune’s exhausted protagonist, “Cagefighter” depicts a heroine embarking on a healing process, a progression toward self-acceptance.

“A thing that was told to me a lot when I was a kid was if you would just be better, [you] wouldn’t be treated [badly],” Forrest says.

By surrounding herself with supportive people like her bandmates, Forrest says she has come to realize that she can be herself and the scripts she grew up with were false.

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As “Cagefighter” comes to a close, Forrest’s ethereal vocal threatens to dissolve in harmonics, yet her words endure amid a soundscape of distorted razor-wire guitars and a distant drill-like whine.

“I finally surrender/ Let my shame out to face the world/ I’ll be a better mother/ Oh I’ll hold you when I’m strong/ And I’ll hold you when I’m not…”

“There’s a rawness of Ali’s writing,” Maust says. “There’s so much in there that people can grab onto.”

“The title track is me talking to my younger self, saying, ‘I’ve got your back,’” Forrest maintains. “I hope people who are chasing a moving goal post of self-improvement for the purpose of proving they’re worthy of love can listen and feel some relief from that chase.”

Amid that relief there is a message for everyone else who is sick of the chase: You are not alone.