Helena Deland’s 2020 album, Someone New, studied the genesis of a relationship and the experience of dissociating along with it. All of it was lovely and intense, leaning on thudding synthesizers and heady, abstracted lyrics where Deland’s coo of a soprano is the centerpiece. “Bright Green Vibrant Gray,” the new single off of her upcoming second record, Goodnight Summerland, has a different texture. Where the songs on Someone New shared a phenotype with the velvety, sensual trip hop of Portishead, “Bright Green Vibrant Gray,” is wispier, folkier.
The song is concerned with new loves, the loss of a parent, thinking of human existence as something geological. To do this, Deland explores naturalism in her images: a journey along the Saint Lawrence River in Québec with icy filtered light, packed snow on the ground where your footprints linger there for days. Jars of powder, ready to be mixed into paints. “Take my hand and run me to the shore,” Deland sings, “Dune grass cool wind blows.” The instrumentation mirrors this lyrical pastoralism: the way the drums turn it all into a sleepy sort of waltz, the way the guitars turn like the tides. It is an exquisite, small song. Something to rub your eyes to as you greet the day, remembering how the world is very big and old.
