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Feb 24, 2022 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Logan Fahey

Los Angeles-based filmmaker and singer/songwriter Haroula Rose makes tender and contemplative indie folk, bearing the hallmarks of luminaries like Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Joni Mitchell. Her third full-length album, Catch the Light, is due out later this year and sees Rose exploring the hidden corners and tangled roots of her inner world in one of her most personal efforts yet.

Rose announced the record earlier this year with her first single “Time’s Fool” and today she is back with her second single from the record, “Spades,” premiering early with Under the Radar.

Like the rest of the record, “Spades” is a sparse and contemplative work, pairing soul-baring lyricism with darkly haunting melodies. The track forms around Rose’s gentle guitar and sweet luminous vocals, accented by touches of piano, chilly swelling synths, and subtle percussion. That tender honesty and stark intimacy allow Rose’s talents as a songwriter to truly shine as her lyrics draw the listener back into the swaying nostalgia of a forgotten romance. Rose’s lyrics bask in the warm glow of a treasured memory, yet her delivery is tinged with melancholic longing. Even as she recalls moonlit nights, joyous laughter, and endless possibility, the tension between wistful memory and heartbreak remains.

Rose explains of the track, “I wrote ‘Spades’ on a trip to Joshua Tree, it came to me fairly quickly and easily. I was remembering some of the times I had been there before, way back to the first time years ago, and then I started thinking about memory in general and how we remember things. The facts of a memory are one thing and then the memory of the feeling can be in some other space — and of course they blur sometimes into a kind of dream-time.

I was thinking about a relationship that had a hazy ending, and reflecting on how the love might very well be there but something just doesn’t ultimately work for a host of other reasons. I guess writing this song is sort of processing that feeling, and how we are constantly growing and changing but the feelings that were there were always genuine even though we have moved on. It’s also about how when you really feel loved you can be anyone or someone and it doesn’t matter where you go — at the risk of sounding cheesy — you feel like you can go anywhere and be yourself. I recently had this conversation with a friend about how it’s important to remember how someone makes you feel and not just about how much you want them. The classic lover and beloved, and how it’s probably the closest thing we can all relate to with having experienced: the pain of loss and the beauty of feeling like you won no matter what because you even got to experience those intense feelings in the first place.”

Check out the song below. Catch the Light is out everywhere on June 17th.