Helena Deland announces debut album Someone New + shares the beautiful title track

I can't overstate how special this one is to me: Helena Deland's astonishing debut album Someone New is coming October 16th on Luminelle. Listen to the title track / thesis statement below, via the Xavier Bélanger-Dorval-directed video, which stars Helena as she sits for the painting that became the Someone New cover art (also by Xavier, pictured below). Pre-order Someone New on limited milky clear vinyl here, and check out Helena's beautiful new website to hear early voice memo versions of the songs from the album as they are released.

"'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." -- Helena Deland