Spellling first exploded into the independent music world with her bewitching debut, Pantheon of Me. But from spacious art pop beginnings through orchestral reimaginings of her older music, Oakland’s own Chrystia Cabral has proved herself to be creatively restless and unrestrained by genre. Her fourth studio album, Portrait of My Heart, embraces a full band and past experiments with orchestration for her heaviest, most guitar-forward production to date.
Thematically, the new album explores the storm and stress of anxiety and alienation, and Cabral is no stranger to the feeling of otherness. A one-time philosophy student at UC Berkeley, she changed her major after feeling “shamed out of the department” as the only femme of color. This hard-won experience of unbelonging brings weight to the record, transforming her litany of references into something more profound than the sum of its parts. Through her signature theatricality, sludgy grunge, hazy shoegaze, and even eye-bleeding nu-metal soar to billowing proportions. If you could call the result gothic, it would be in the manner of a cathedral: intricate and thrumming with drama.
Portrait of My Heart is out now, and the title track might be the best rock song to ever include the lyric “I don’t belong here” (fight me). Spellling also just released a reimagined version of the song “Destiny Arrives” from the new album with the help of indie singer-songwriter Weyes Blood.
