Spelling announces new album 'Portrait of My Heart' and shares the title track • GRIMM Gent

SPELLLING (aka Chrystia Cabral) announces her new album, ‘Portrait of My Heart’, out March 28th via Sacred Bones, and shares a video for the lead single, “Portrait of My Heart.”

On Cabral’s fourth album as SPELLLING, the Bay Area artist transforms her acclaimed avant-pop project into a mirror, as her lyrics for ‘Portrait of My Heart’ tackle love, intimacy, anxiety, and alienation, trading the allegorical approach of much of her previous work for something she says is “pointed into my human heart.” The result is the sharpest, most direct SPELLLING album to date, and its immediacy emphasises the essential mutability of Cabral’s practice. From the dark minimalism of her earliest music to the lavishly orchestrated prog-pop of 2021’s ‘The Turning Wheel’ to this newly energetic expression of her creative spirit, Cabral has proved again and again that SPELLLING can be whatever she needs it to be.

In what became the genesis for the rest of “Portrait of My Heart”, the title track, with its propulsive drum groove and anthemic chorus of “I don’t belong here,” is a potent embodiment of the album’s turn toward emotional directness. Once Cabral came up with the main melody, she found herself using the song as a tool to work through the anxiety she sometimes struggles with as a performer: “If this is what I’m supposed to be doing, and that I’ve chosen this life path, why does it cause me so much discomfort all the time?” She continues: “The song conceptually is dealing with the sort of mental torment of being obsessed with making art and it consuming you. Choosing art over everything…over love…over the love of life and dealing with the consequences of this.”

“When the lyrics for the title track came together, it really started to morph everything in this more energetic direction, instead of this more whimsical landscape that I’ve worked with before. It started to become more driven, higher energy, more focused,” Cabral explains. “And I have a big affection for it because of that. I love that it feels like it withstood transformation, which is something I always want to aspire to with things that I make. I want them to have this sense of timelessness. It could exist like this, or like that, or like this, but this is the one for right now.”

The accompanying video was directed by Ambar Navarro and explores the obsession that comes with making art and when you’re deep in the hole of creativity.

Before undertaking her tour for ‘The Turning Wheel’, Cabral assembled a band including core members Wyatt Overson (guitar), Patrick Shelley (drums), and Giulio Xavier Cetto (bass), and their ongoing collaboration has uncovered new contours of the SPELLLING sound. Cabral still writes and demos in isolation, but presenting the songs for ‘Portrait of My Heart’ to her bandmates, named the Mystery School, helped her discover their eventual lively, organic forms. So did working with a trio of producers—The Turning Wheel mixing engineer Drew Vandenberg, SZA collaborator Rob Bisel, and Yves Tumor producer Psymun.

However, ‘Portrait of My Heart’ is also shaped significantly by its guest musicians. The original plan was to have a featured artist on every track; that idea was scrapped when Cabral realized some of the material was too personal to put in someone else’s mouth. But a few key features help shape the album. Chaz Bear (Toro y Moi) sings on “Mount Analogue,” the first true duet in the SPELLLING discography. Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory turns Cabral’s original piano demo for “Alibi” into the crunchy, riff-y version that appears on the record, while Zulu’s Braxton Marcellous gives “Drain” its sludgy heft. These parts aren’t just incorporated seamlessly into the album; they feel like an integral part of its universe.

Ultimately, though, ‘Portrait of My Heart’ is nobody’s record but Cabral’s. She fearlessly draws the curtain back on parts of herself that she’s never included in SPELLLING before—her feelings of being an outsider, her overly guarded nature, the way she can throw herself recklessly into intimate relationships and then cool on them just as quickly. “It’s very much an open diary of all those sensations,” she says. There’s a real generosity in that, as listeners may recognise themselves in Portrait of My Heart in a way they haven’t on past albums.