Helena Deland - Goodnight Summerland (2023) [Hi-Res]

By Megan LaPierre

Montreal-based singer-songwriter Helena Deland has announced her sophomore record, previewed today by idyllic new single "Bright Green Vibrant Gray."

Goodnight Summerland is due October 13 through Chivi Chivi. It follows 2020's Someone New — one of Exclaim!'s 50 best albums of that year.

Deland's new album was recorded with Sam Evian at Flying Cloud Recordings in the Catskill mountains. They co-produced Goodnight Summerland — a journey they decided to embark on together after recording "Bright Green Vibrant Gray," which arrives after previous singles "Spring Bug" and "Swimmer."

"I wrote 'Bright Green Vibrant Gray' shortly after losing my mother," Deland shared in a press release, adding that she was also thinking of a trip she had taken to a town in Charlevoix where the dramatic cliffs had been shaped by a meteorite strike over 400 million years ago. "On the scale of our human lives, we might recognize the watershed moments, but there is no telling how deeply or subtly they affect us. Lyrically, the song is interested in contrasts — the immediacy and acuity of a nascent romance in the context of larger forces such as geological time."

She continued, "I was interested in contextualizing an encounter between two people within nature's humbling and overwhelming scale, which outlasts and ultimately subsumes any smaller and human-scale experiences within it. In discovering another person, there is a heightened awareness, a life-affirming purposefulness. It is akin to creative inspiration; the painter in the video whose work holds such power and immediate force to her ultimately wonders where her work will end up after she's gone."