Scarlett O'Hanna (BEL)
For the French-Greek Brussels-based singer-songwriter Scarlett O’Hanna, a decade between full-length records has been necessary. As she puts it: “Sometimes it takes time to be alive.” The vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer shared her revelatory last album Romance Floats in 2014 via Pop-up Records/Cargo, filled with tracks that soar and crash essentially across a range of knotty guitar refrains, conveying a compelling electric drive. After the release, the strain of the Greek financial and social crisis on her family led to a reckoning with her own art, which transformed into a ten year pursuit of new composition and vocal work beyond music: podcast, dance and film scores, sound installations, translations, voiceovers and community work. “I got away from songwriting for a while. I wanted to engage with other forms of music and sound making. Being part of a bigger picture, serving other people’s projects. There’s a relief and a playfulness to it I felt I had lost in my own music. I learned a lot”, she shared.
On Precious Nothings O'Hanna reveals herself in all her splendour in seven songs marked by immediacy and the versatile mastery of her voice. The singles 'Precious Nothings', 'Open Doors' and 'Unafraid' echo themes that run through the album, such as the search for a sense of belonging. On Precious Nothings I wanted to open it wide.” explains Scarlett who approached the new album directly “from a writing-producing place” composing most of the songs on synthesiser and electronic drums: “I spent a lot of time at home looking for the sounds I wanted to hear. (…) I wanted to lean into a more cinematic approach of production.” After pre-producing the tracks, Scarlett O'Hanna entered Robot Studio in Ghent where she recorded with co-producer Pieterjan Coppejans, who mixed the album, and then worked with Matt Colton on the mastering at Metropolis Studio in London. In returning to familiar forms with a fresh artistic drive one only finds in chasing new horizons, Scarlett O’Hanna achieves the grace of a modern classic on Precious Nothings, harkening back to the ecstasy of peak new-wave while remaining fully rooted in her unique singer-songwriter present. Hardships and high points wrapped all in one, Precious Nothings reflects a decades worth of Scarlett’s evolution as an artist, a long-term breakthrough laid out plainly on Precious Nothings’ opening track “Unafraid”: “These are unloving times to live but / At the end of fear is a door.
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Precious Nothings (Official Video)
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