SPELLLING

"Chrystia Cabral dances the line between straightforward dream pop and aquatic, experimental electronic folk."

On Chrystia Cabral’s fourth album as SPELLLING, the Bay Area artist transforms her acclaimed avant-pop project into a mirror. Cabral’s 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 album’s thematic forthrightness is echoed in its arrangements. Portrait of My Heart is the sharpest, most direct SPELLLING album to date, and its immediacy emphasizes 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.

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.