Helena Deland is a Sullen Force in 'Someone New'
By Anna Wojnarowski
Someone New understands that subtlety can be louder than luridness. Helena Deland not only captures that but masters it to incomparable effect. Her debut album, Deland has done something that the likes of her contemporaries have yet to accomplish: make their magnum opus on the first try. Being able to create a cohesive album with songs that feel so intricately connected while simultaneously sounding like they’re from their own parallel universes is a feat in itself. If Deland were to stop there, this album would still be a wonder. However, she goes further, delineating each measure to her thoughts up until the last note.
Someone New’s sound is akin to how Baroque paintings look: sullen, quiet, and abstractly cognizant of the real world. The album cover showcases those same qualities: Deland looking off to her right, in a blanket of darkness with only a soft glimmer of light to allow the viewer to see the subject. In “Someone New”, the album’s opening track, that visual darkness moves aside for a slight moment of lyrical light: Beginning with a low grumble over Deland’s melodic ramblings about being stuck in her own mind, it becomes a depressingly meditative kaleidoscope of instrumental arrangements that follows Deland’s fantasies of wanting to live in her room with a stranger until she herself becomes one: “If things go my way / I'll stay in this room / Where again I want to lay / Kissing someone new / Who tells me / Something pretty / So that I too / Can feel like someone new.”
In “Lylz”, lo-fi guitar and ever-present snares are filtered into the background as Deland asks her friend to come over, gossip, and “make face masks / Death masks.” Alluding to quarantining in a pandemic, this feeling of isolation is not newfound. Throughout the album, Deland dissects her history of longing for any sort of connection. In “Smoking at the Gas Station”, that wanting of attention transforms to a more existential question: how do I ground myself in the middle of my dissociation? Having difficulty answering that question, in “Pale”, her attempts to know herself again prove futile: “Spending this much time / In my naked body’s / Not making it familiar to me.”
With a voice that exudes a calmer version of Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval (if that’s even possible), it allows for the alarming concepts and thoughts that Deland is singing about to come off as chillingly matter of fact. Using her voice as a vessel, the ambivalence that Deland provides in her performance allows for the emotionally charged meanings of the lyrics to come to explicit prominence. “Seven Hours”, which only has one verse, describes a long car ride that Deland finds hostile but without any reasoning as to why. Deland states that it’s a “Seven-hour drive / With nothing to say” before ending the song, putting the guitar down, and sitting in silence.
Wielding every second of each song, Deland uses the absence of sound with cinematic intent. In “Fill the Rooms”, the last track on the album, there are periods of silence that follow the lead of the lyrics sung: “Now that you’ve let me / You’ve let me inside your head / Did you let yourself forget / I was in there and wanted music?” Finally getting what she wants, Deland realizes that her partner has an assumption that she will help them, not the other way around. When she arrives and sees that they will not bring life to the relationship, the music stops completely in the middle of the song. A moment of pensiveness arises before Deland picks up again and sings: “Now that you’ve put me / You’ve put me in charge of the rest / To entertain your guests / I will fill the rooms with music.” Continuing the song tentatively, Deland tries out her newfound responsibility. However, when her partner leaves, “jumping from roof to roof”, Deland is left back to where she began: alone. Although she knows she won’t be heard, Deland yells “Come back!” before sitting in her own silence. Then ten seconds later, she starts back up again, as if for one last hoorah, proclaiming to her long gone partner, “Fill the rooms with music!”. From Deland’s perspective, the story that this album chronicles goes out with an exhausted, tried, and dejected whimper. To the listener, it is a paralyzingly powerful conclusion to an album that feels less like someone made it and more like it was manifested through a dream state version of divine intervention.