Helena Deland announces new album, Goodnight Summerland

"Bright Green Vibrant Gray" is Helena’s third single released with Montreal label and longtime collaborators Chivi Chivi, following 2022's "Swimmer" and 2023’s "Spring Bug" which also appear on Goodnight Summerland.

The track is accompanied by a Xavier Beldor-directed video, depicting Deland going on a painting expedition through the deep snow in Charlevoix, Quebec.

"I wrote the song thinking of a trip I took to a town on the St. Lawrence River, in Charlevoix, Quebec, where the rolling hills and dramatic cliffs were shaped by a meteorite striking the region over 400 million years ago. Upon impact, its geology changed forever, and since then, erosion has slowly done its work," Deland says, adding that the song was written shortly after losing her mother.

"On the scale of our human lives, we might recognise the watershed moments, but there is no telling how deeply or subtly they affect us. Lyrically, the song is interested in contrasts – the immediacy and acuity of a nascent romance in the context of larger forces such as geological time," she continues.

"I was interested in contextualising an encounter between two people within nature’s humbling and overwhelming scale, which outlasts and ultimately subsumes any smaller and human-scale experiences within it. In discovering another person, there is a heightened awareness, a life-affirming purposefulness. It is akin to creative inspiration; the painter in the video whose work holds such power and immediate force to her ultimately wonders where her work will end up after she’s gone.

Goodnight Summerland was recorded with Sam Evian at Flying Cloud Recordings in the Catskill mountains. It was engineered by Sam, co-produced by Helena and Sam and mastered by Heba Kadry (Bjork, Beach House, Slowdive). Deland's new songs have simpler musical arrangements than 2020's dream pop debut Someone New, focussing on the sheer joy and transformative power of a good song and inspired by Joni Mitchell and Vashti Bunyan.

In November 2023 and February 2024, Helena will be going on her first world headline tour, with newly confirmed dates happening in the UK and Europe, including a date at The Lexington in London.

Tracklist:

1. Moon Pith
2. Saying Something
3. Spring Bug
4. Bright Green Vibrant Gray
5. Drawbridge
6. Roadflower
7. The Animals
8. Who I Sound Like
9. Swimmer
10 .Night Soft As Silk
11. Strawberry Moon