Duffy has marked her return to music by releasing a powerful new track.
The 35-year-old released the poignant, piano-driven song River in the Sky on her Instagram page, captioning the post ‘For the better days to come.’
The track is the second song Duffy has released since 2010, having previously unveiled Something Beautiful on Jo Whiley's BBC Radio 2 show back in March.
The Welsh songstress has since explained that she decided to bow out of the public eye after she was “raped, drugged and held captive”, and had spent many years trying to recover from her ordeal.
“Of course I survived. The recovery took time. There’s no light way to say it,” she said in an emotional post on social media in February this year.
“But I can tell you in the last decade, the thousands and thousands of days I committed to wanting to feel the sunshine in my heart again, the sun does now shine.
“You wonder why I did not choose to use my voice to express my pain? I did not want to show the world the sadness in my eyes. I asked myself, how can I sing from the heart if it is broken? And slowly it unbroke.”
Duffy then went into further details about the incident in April, before adding she was committed to releasing music again.
“The perpetrator drugged me in my own home in the four weeks, I do not know if he raped me there during that time, I only remember coming round in the car in the foreign country and the escape that would happen by me fleeing in the days following that,” she explained.
“I believe that if you speak from the heart within you, the heart within others will answer. As dark as my story is, I do speak from my heart, for my life, and for the life of others, whom have suffered the same.
“I know this much though, I owe it to myself to release a body of work someday, though I very much doubt I will ever be the person people once knew. My music will be measured on the merit of its quality and this story will be something I experienced and not something that describes me.”
Duffy first shot to fame in 2008 with her worldwide hit single Mercy from her debut album Rockferry, which became the best-selling album of that year. She also released hits Warwick Avenue, Stepping Stone and Rain on Your Parade later that year.
River in the Sky, which will only be available on Duffy’s social media channels, includes the lyrics: “I see the sadness in her eyes / she knew the tears would always come and go / like a river / like a river in the sky.”
