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Oct 06, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Sabrina Jolicoeur Helena Deland

Montréal’s Helena Deland is releasing her debut full-length album, Someone New, on October 16 via Luminelle Recordings. Now she has shared another song from it, “Pale.” Listen below.

“‘Pale’ is about the little space left to the actual self in romantic relationships where idealization comes into play,” says Deland in a press release.

The song is accompanied by a simple visualizer featuring foaming water in a stream, which Deland says “represents the question of control when control is ultimately impossible.”

In July Deland shared the album’s “Lylz.” Then when the album was announced in August she shared the album’s title track, “Someone New,” via a video that showed Deland posing for the portrait painting which graces the album’s cover. Then she shared another song from it, atmospheric slow-burner “Truth Nugget” (which was one of our Songs of the Week).

In a previous press release Deland had this to say about the album as a whole: “Someone New is about paradoxically feeling sick of and unfamiliar with myself. I realized that I associated primarily with what others (real or imagined) projected onto me, and acted in ways to avoid disappointing this projection or imagined expectation. The quest to please and conform distracted me from who I already was and I labored to comply to a normative set of expectations. I noticed my troubled relationship with my body, which escaped my control and gave others so much information it seemed to withhold from me. I sought comfort in romantic relationships, which validated me and where I was free to at least momentarily reinvent myself for the other’s sake. I felt guilty of my privilege, the idea of which my dejection didn’t sit well with, and I was trapped in patterns that grew more and more familiar. I longed to become someone new! I had to look at this critically in order to write songs I thought made the least bit of sense, trying not to give into the tendency to bend myself to integrated expectations and my anxiety to please. The meta delight in this whole story is that the process helped me better recognize what defines me both outwardly and inwardly, and made me somewhat new to myself.”

Deland has previously released a series of well received EPs and singles—including 2018’s two interconnected EPs, collectively titled From The Series of Songs “Altogether Unaccompanied” Vol. III & Vol. IV.

Read our 2018 The End interview with Helena Deland about endings and death.

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