Ten minute tea with Afternoon Tea. Spend ten minutes with Afternoon Tea. In the time it takes to boil one kettle, and let one cup of tea steep, we will have your daily art + music fix covered. Take your afternoon break with our Afternoon Tea curators. Need an extra lump of sugar? One more sip? If you have five minutes more (or ten), we have one more hit.
Today’s tea + soundtrack + visuals curated by Lauren Minear.
New York-based artist Lauren Minear shares her transformative new album, Boxing Day, featuring the fragile, urgent lead single, “Bruise.” Written in the aftermath of betrayal and self-reflection, the record traces a path through anger, shame, acceptance, and ultimately liberation. With raw confessional lyrics and immersive soundscapes that blend alternative, pop, rock, and folk, Boxing Day is Minear‘s most ambitious work to date.
Minear began writing the record in July 2023, after cutting ties with a creative agency she discovered had been stealing from her. “I always write my way through intense feelings,” she explains. “But I realized that the anger and shame I was experiencing went deeper than just this one conflict. These songs allowed me to confront patterns of repressed anger and codependency, and to liberate myself from them in the process.”
Stream + share Boxing Day in full now:
At the core of the record is “Bruise,” a song inspired by the paradox of loving someone who also causes deep pain. Acoustic and guitar-driven, the track reveals the sadness that lies beneath anger, reinforced by Minear‘s choice to sing the chorus in falsetto to highlight fragility. “We wrote ‘Bruise‘ on Day 4 of our Woodstock sessions, bundled up in coats in a freezing guest house,” she recalls. “The environment and the song were well suited, because we ended up with something that sounds fragile. I think the cold added some urgency.”
“Bruise” draws on themes of survival, shame, and self-overcoming, and for Minear, singing it still stirs discomfort. “It was painful to write and, for a long time, painful to sing,” she admits. “I’m working on that.”
With Boxing Day, Minear offers her most powerful statement yet: that even in anger and shame, liberation and light can be found.
Tea: Ginger Tea with honey (my favorite)
Art: “Leave A Light On” – Kimia Kline
Music: “Every Heartbeat”, Gracie Potter
Kimia is one of my oldest and most inspiring friends. She explores motherhood in many of her paintings, and they always make me feel something visceral, just like Gracie’s Album Daylight. I listened to it in the days leading up to the birth of my second child, so it will always mark an important moment in time for me. I had minor complications at the end of that pregnancy, the upside of which was that I spent a lot of hours listening to my son’s heartbeat on a fetal monitor. When I told my therapist about it, she sent me “Every Heartbeat” by Gracie Potter. It is one of the songs that inspired me to start writing music again in 2020, after many years away.
Tea + Me 