Brooding piano and reflections on apathy define Dead or Something, the new single from Swedish musician Vendela.
Vendela has contemplated her mortality on Dead or Something, a brooding ballad that serves as the Swedish musician’s latest single.
The track opens with contemplative keys, with sparse production rightfully forefronting Vendela’s enrapturing vocals. Somehow whispery and grave in equal measure, the singer’s timbre sets the stage for her incisive reflection on apathy in the face of love.
What begins as a piano-driven ballad laters transforms into something more hard hitting, as atmospheric synths deepen the soundscape and the chorus swells to noisy ascendance.
Here, Vendela sings through glitchy vocoder flourishes, as treble effects and soaring harmonies create an eerie ethereality.
Pairing her unique sound with teeth-baring lyricism, Dead of Something sees Vendela grapple with feeling unfazed or unable to fall in love, singing of her inability to cry and “catch a feeling.
View this post on Instagram
It’s a powerful and relatable tale, punctuated by gut-punching questions about her own emotionality: “Will somebody break me?,” she croons on the first verse, “what the hell is wrong with me?”
Taking this theme to its graphic extremes, the accompanying music video finds Vendela bloodied and deserted in an icy abyss.
Filmed by Vendela, Francisco Faria and Disorder, the clip sees the singer uncover an unbeating heart and throw it to the wind, a visual take on the song’s message of unplaceable apathy.
While the single would stand as a feat for any musician, Dead or Something is doubly impressive given Vendela’s relative greenness in the scene.
Her debut single, Komodo, arrived last January, alongside a pair of tracks Atta Boy and Hell, Yeah later that year.
While those releases saw Vendela sever new lanes in the mainstream — an extension of what she calls the “unavoidable wicked part of us we try hard to shut down” — Dead of Something finds her in a moment of vulnerability, and we’re all the better for it.
Listen to Vendela’s new single Dead or Something below.
