Hila [CD]

Frankie Rose has spent fifteen years building one of the most quietly distinctive bodies of work in American independent music. Each record has pushed further into its own atmosphere without abandoning the melodic instincts that anchor all of it.

HILA is her sixth. It is also her most interior. Featuring Justin Welch on drums (Lush, Elastica), the record moves with the deliberate, pressurized quiet of a Michael Mann soundtrack, but filtered through something stranger and more ritualistic—Coil’s shadow, Cocteau Twins’ density, and the sense of language dissolving into frequency.

Where Love as Projection opened outward into electronic pop, HILA turns inward. It is Rose’s most impressionistic record, and in some ways her most experimental—though the songwriting never loses its footing. The melodies are still there. They just arrive from further away.

As Rose puts it: “Hila. A record about loss. What persists beyond the range of ordinary perception. The place mourning keeps returning to—not quite transcendence, not quite doubt. The edge of what we can see.”