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Aug 11, 2020 By Christopher Roberts Photography by Jack Bool Helena Deland

Montréal’s Helena Deland has already 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—but now she has announced her debut full-length album, Someone New, and shared a new song from it, title track “Someone New,” via a video for it. Someone New is due out October 16 via Luminelle Recordings. Checkout the “Someone New” video below, followed by the album’s tracklist and cover art.

In July Deland shared the album’s “Lylz.” Xavier Bélanger-Dorval directed the “Someone New” video, which shows Deland posing for the portrait painting that graces the album’s cover.

Deland had this to say about the new single in a press release: “‘Someone New’ is about the validation and relief from one’s internal world that a romantic encounter can offer, but also about becoming aware that there seems to be an expiry date on that type of opportunity for women. It ambivalently celebrates and condemns the idea of being in one’s ‘prime,’ as it is so rare that youth and self-understanding are simultaneous.”

She 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.”

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

Someone New Tracklist:

01 Someone New
02 Truth Nugget
03 Dog
04 Fruit Pit
05 Pale
06 Comfort, Edge
07 The Walk Home
08 Seven Hours
09 Smoking at the Gas Station
10 Lylz
11 Mid-Practice
12 Clown Neutral
13 Fill the Rooms

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