SPELLLING : Portrait of My Heart
For the decade (give or take) when revival movements started arriving like alien invaders, what would revivalism of the 2000s itself sound like? Rap and electronic music have certainly progressed to new forms and revisions. Among subgenres, both post-punk and emo seem to have subsumed their own revivals so everything new there is old again. The new album from SPELLLING, Portrait of My Heart, pulls at threads from that turn of the century to knot together R&B and alternative rock as each began to top that era’s charts in earnest.
Chrystia Cabral’s fifth album as SPELLLING is her first where she’s playing brand-new work with the band she assembled for the revised arrangements of older songs on 2023’s Spellling & the Mystery School. Past reviews and interviews have highlighted SPELLLING’s fandom of and references to old queens of pop and rock. Portrait of My Heart flips many pages ahead in Cabral’s calendar.
Her enthusiastic vocal timbre and her band’s deeply textured rock, especially in the LP’s opening tracks up through “Alibi,” bring the same kind of energy Gwen Stefani brought as she was just starting to break away from No Doubt. She also manages expertly camouflaged R&B like “Sometimes” and “Waterfall” that would keep up with the (Norah) Joneses were their respective guitar parts swapped out for piano.
It’s the commitment to the heavy rock side of things that makes Portrait of My Heart so fascinating. “Satisfaction” is a positively metal two minutes, and Turnstile’s Pat McCrory jumps in to flesh out “Alibi.” The results really peak in a song like “Drain”—full of plaintive melody, crunchy minor-key riffs, even rhythm changes—where SPELLLING imagines a sonic world that’s more than just grimier than neo-soul or just elevated above the modern rock formed from the fallout of Nirvana.
This may be SPELLLING’s most traditional album by degrees, yet it refuses to even tread a skillful path between Cabral’s earliest darkwave experiments and later fascination with chamber-pop. Portrait of My Heart stands musical tropes on their heads, inserting bits of one genre into another and vice versa, not repeating musical history but definitely getting it to rhyme.
Label: Sacred Bones
Year: 2025
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Spellling : Portrait of My Heart
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