The edgy new heights of SPELLLING’s panoramic mysticism

The magic of Oakland-based artist Chrystia Cabral, aka SPELLLING, is that she can do both: her unravelling songs are embedded within a larger, more enigmatic story. On 2021’s The Turning Wheel, her breakout third album, she sounded like a wise, omniscient narrator, opening up a creaking book of fairytales to pass down a hero’s scrappy, theatrical journey, full of enchanting mysticism and soaring, high vocals.

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard it, driving to my job at Starbucks in the pitch-black darkness of 4:45am, feeling totally enveloped by the album's shroud of mystery. I remember thinking how light and airy it was, yet somehow lush and almost tangible.

Which is why the lead single and title track for her new album Portrait of My Heart caught me and other SPELLLING-heads by surprise (“Is this indie rock?”). Instead of a pillowy garden of sound, the title track was anthemic, something to scream out to, bolstered by its mega-chorus. “I don’t belong here!” Cabral calls out, with all the petulance of a teen mixed with the desperation of a spiralling adult.

“It’s so cathartic to put your voice in there and be able to have that earworm get inside your head,” she tells me from her studio in California, with musical equipment hanging on the wall behind her. The massive anthems on Portrait of My Heart were always with her, she says, she'd just lacked the necessary tools to get there until now. “Sometimes I feel like the ideas are always a little out of reach of the gear that I have,” she explains. “Now that I have a band, I felt interested in writing songs that could match my vision more directly.”

Portrait's vision-made-real songs are grandiose punk, grunge, and art-rock battlefields where Cabral can belt miraculous choruses or wrap a sticky melody around a crescendo. “Get me outta this ordinary life!” she demands on the hedonistic “Keep It Alive”, later finding angry release in the pure power-pop of “Alibi”, which features Turnstile guitarist Pat McCrory. There’s a cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “Sometimes” on there, too – her favourite song to “cry and yearn” to.

Portrait’s other influences were what you might find on Cabral’s high-school era iPod: No Doubt, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Blonde Redhead. But, of course, there’s always a bit of SPELLLING mysticism seeping through, imbuing the songs with a touch of surrealism. “Even if I try to write something that’s pretty classic rock or traditional rock, it’s not gonna be that,” she says. “It’s just never gonna be that. Even if I think I’m doing it, I'm not.”

The title track reckons with loneliness, using some lyrics pulled from her early journals, but it also speaks to her identity as an artist in the now. “When I think about my place in the world, I’ve always felt like an outsider in a lot of different areas of my life, even when I have been invited in or included,” she explains. “I don’t know if it’s just my character to want to be a brooding, antisocial person… I long and yearn to be a part of the conversation or community or a place where I fit in, but at the same time I know I’ll feel restless there. I won’t feel like I’m really connected in the same way as I observe everybody else.”

Despite her critical acclaim, Cabral finds herself asking if her work is too niche and worrying about the endless touring cycles and self-promotion that she finds artistically draining, not to mention the self-absorption that a project like SPELLLING requires. “You’re obsessed with yourself: 'What am I doing? What am I making?'," she says. "It can feel so icky sometimes… Where’s the purity?”

I bring up a lyric from the song, one of my favourites from the record: “Now I sit here with my colours painted so odd / Cuz I dare to fiddle with the work of God.” It’s paraphrased, she says, from something the Canadian painter Philip Guston said in a documentary about his work, which made her think about the moral role of the artist. She pummels me with rhetorical questions: “What are the implications of what you do as an artist? Is it just for yourself? Who is it for? What kind of freedom can you create as an artist? And if you’re not creating a sense of freedom for other people outside of yourself, then what is it for?”

Raised in the Catholic faith, Cabral says she feels the need to make an impact while also believing in the world’s natural beauty and order. “God is an artist,” she explains. “He’s made a situation on earth where we can create harmony or contribute what we have with our talents and skills. I just feel this moral implication: what am I going to do with that? And not detract from or take away my potential as an artist and relationship to a spiritual connection with God.”

Surprisingly, Cabral says she’s only recently started coming to terms with being an artist. Signing with NYC label Sacred Bones in 2019 was an “interesting experiment,” she says, but after The Turning Wheel’s success, she had the money and resources to expand her vision. She created that album herself, terrified of outside influence, but on Portrait she welcomed it. “I wanted these reference points. I wanted to know what other people are doing and how they would see this,” she says of bringing in co-producers Rob Bisel and Psymun. “If I’m gonna elevate the art, and I’m gonna keep elevating it towards the sounds that I have in my mind, I need to improve my technique,” she adds pragmatically.

“Being an artist wasn’t something I necessarily knew was gonna be what my life revolved around,” she says, explaining that her relationship to herself was more defined during the writing process for The Turning Wheel and its predecessor Mazy Fly. “I felt a stronger spiritual grounding [then],” she adds. “Writing was the outlet for a lot of my spiritual inquiries and explorations and interests and passions. I was a sort of channel, a radio station dialled towards what I feel like are spirits or energies outside of myself.” This might sound a little New Age-y, but listen to a song like The Turning Wheel’s “Little Deer” and it’s easy to believe that Cabral’s songwriting could well be ordained by a higher metaphysical realm.

But discomfort can be a sign of good things to come, I say. If something is challenging, that might be the best indication that it’s worth doing. She agrees it’s a good reminder. “A lot of times it’s like, ‘Oop, discomfort, I want to bail, backtrack,’ but it is a good sign that you feel that in your body. [Then] you push back and actually acknowledge that there’s gonna be discomfort any time you’re growing.” On “Destiny Arrives”, the crescendo purposefully hints at accepting fate with open arms, “embracing the idea of things being out of your control in a positive way or as a beautiful thing.” It’ll happen either way, right?

Discomfort, or pushing yourself, is how Portrait’s most stunning moments come to be. Take “Waterfall”, for example. Inspired by a solo hike in the Canadian Rockies, it’s a propulsive, epic ballad where Cabral’s voice strikes its most poignant chord. “Veil of change / Let me through your light / I don’t want to stay in the world / He left behind,” she sings, stretching each syllable to its limit. Four years ago, she wouldn’t have been able to do it, but through touring and practicing she learned that “if I want to sing it badly enough, I can work towards it.”

“I could sing it falsetto-style, which sounds cool and smooth, but it’s not the power we want,” she says. “We want to sound like we’re screaming on the top of a mountain. It needs to feel cathartic, as much as it did for me to figure out the lyrics and unlock them.” She’s surprised when I described it as a showstopper – to her, it’s an oasis, a little “refresher.” But people’s reactions to the new material and how they differ from her intent are always entertaining, she says.

Elsewhere on the grungy “Drain” and electric “Satisfaction”, she lurches into a prickly maze of shame; in one lyric, she’s “terrified” by her own desires. “Through the work, through the songs, I was letting myself go there, trying to let myself examine these tendencies that I have, letting the sensations of shame, the gritty, darker, desperate elements of how I show up in relationships come to surface,” she says. She loved Babygirl, the steamy, shame-centred Nicole Kidman film from last year that I bring up when we talk about the spectre of debilitating self-analysis. “Drown me in your magnitude / Painfully, I’d like you to,” she growls on “Drain” before its monstrous second half – “I’m your problem now.”

The songwriting process took a while, which makes sense for an album reckoning with art-making itself. Cabral talks about experiencing a sort of tunnel vision where she’d be all-in, “living only there,” waking up and thinking about how she’ll make a certain song work. Now with everything off to the label, she feels “released back into the world,” having to “relearn being present” in her own life. “It’s an abrupt, disorienting process,” she says.

Part of the reintegration process is nurturing that artist/person divide, but it doesn’t mean she can’t turn her attention towards new work. She’s already got a new group of songs she was working on alongside Portrait, reminiscent of early SPELLLING material. “My heart’s wanting to go in, I want to get back in my synth bag,” she says, but for now her focus is on the upcoming tour, where the songs from Portrait will be more energetic to hear live but no less entrancing. Is it time to rock out?

“It’s time to rock out,” she confirms, agreeing when I suggest she’s in her Hannah Montana era. Her band will play the songs even faster, complete with alternate intros and countermelodies, using leftover ideas that had to be scrapped during the mixing process – a trance version of “Waterfall” sounds particularly appealing.

Even so, my hope is that the strife she mentioned earlier while doing the industry necessities is lessened with this tour. It’s fascinating that Cabral, whose singular artistic vision seems to come so naturally, took so long to convince herself of her artistry and acceptance as it merged with a career path. Even though the music industry’s toll on artists has recently become more openly talked about, the impact still runs deep.

Nevertheless, she describes Portrait as “a creative resurgence” and “a way to bridge the gap” between SPELLLING the artist and Chrystia the person: more forthright, more honest, less cloaked in mystery. The price of a small identity crisis in the process is one she’s come to terms with. Through asking the big questions like “Who am I?” and “What are my relationships?”, she was able to explore romance and intimacy “in new ways” that reflect on and address the changes in herself. She describes feeling “a big sense of relief” from coming to the end, as if the portrait’s completion marked a pivotal moment, a return to self. “There’s Tia and there’s SPELLLING,” she says firmly. “This album is much more personal, it’s much more Tia.”