A lifetime of existential loneliness in the form of an album debut from Helena Deland
The full-length album debut from Canadian singer/songwriter, Helena Deland, Someone New is a challenging album to listen to at times. At a little over 45 minutes in length, the album features sonically dissonant instrumentals mixed with Deland’s ethereal vocal stylings and lyrics that do not reveal their full potency and meaning until you’ve read them or sat with them for a long time. This distance between the listener and the album, however, is not a defect, but part of the central thematic idea to the album: disconnect, distance between people who are close, and the existential loneliness that will inevitably consume you when you live with that disconnect for years of your life.
Brilliantly, not all of these songs — each exploring connections with other people — are romantic in nature. Most notably, “Truth Nugget” and “Lylz” read as platonic, exploring the strange and at times shallow emotional connections that come with many friendships. These two songs reveal the disconnect that can be felt even with the people you are closest to, either through not knowing or not understanding how someone’s inner life works. Even if you are being emotionally honest with each other, the experiences of isolation due to world-shaking events, or someone living with mental illness, can all still generate that disconnect.
Another highlight of the album is “The Walk Home.” As a purely instrumental track, its middle placement in the album offers an emotional reset — a chance for the listener to catch their breath and briefly reflect on the first half of the album before going into the even more emotional second half. The track itself is an odd arrangement that is at once suspenseful and almost uncomfortable to listen to, then in the next moment calm.
The second half of the album is a showcase of want. That longing for connection runs through “Smoking At The Gas Station,” where the narrator explicitly asks to be loved; “Lylz,” where the distance between friends has left the narrator feeling even more isolated; and “Mid-Practice,” where the narrator begins to address the issues she’s had connecting to people and the concept of love as a whole.
“Fill The Rooms” is a perfect closing track to this album. Thematically, it develops the understanding of “Someone New,” the titular opening track in which the narrator wants to be someone else. By the end, the narrator has found a personal connection with someone new, only for them to leave, with the narrator almost begging them to return and “fill the empty rooms with music.”
Someone New as an album is likely going to be a deeply personal record for anyone who listens to it — whether you have an emotional connection to its lyrics, or you get something completely different from the album entirely. As a project, it offers a selection of well-crafted songs with a distinct voice, in both writing and Deland’s prowess as a vocalist. Whatever you get out of it, this is sure to be an album that will haunt its listeners.
