Helena Deland is back this month with a new video for “Someone New” from her upcoming debut LP of the same name due out October 16th via Luminelle. Following up on her track “Lylz,” an ode to the power of friendship and sisterly devotion, “Someone New” is a bittersweet meditation on memory and our habitual patterns of mind. Seen through the lens of a romantic encounter, and the validation we seek in the “other,” this song is a sort of thesis statement for the album as it brings Deland face to face with a deeper understanding of herself.
A microcosm for the album as a whole, the musician’s explanation of the process reveals the depths to which her art has taken her while seeking greater powers of expression and songcraft. She explains:
“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 laboured 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.”
The video for the track is directed by Xavier Bélanger-Dorval, and like the album’s cover, it finds Helena Deland sitting for the painting of her portrait. You can watch the video below, and after the embed, you will find album art and tracklisting…
Tracklist:
Someone New
Truth Nugget
Dog
Fruit Pit
Pale
Comfort, Edge
The Walk Home
Seven Hours
Smoking at the Gas Station
Lylz
Mid-Practice
Clown Neutral
Fill the Rooms
