Los Angeles artist belabela has shared a new song with the release of the sizzling and brooding “Blood.” It serves as the first of two posthumous singles by the late Bella Isabelle Catherine Jhun — a creator of electro-shoegaze who was also honing her skills as an audio engineer while working live sound at the Whiskey a Go Go. Gone far too soon she is survived by the intimately enigmatic music she’d only just begun to record.
Her first single “Blood” paints a striking portrait of a mind consumed and haunted by the memory of a love that’s left it behind. Saturated by a gothic aura and thrumming 808s, it’s the kind of track you plug into and let rumble over you. One that entangles its desirous ferocity with bleak desperation in the ethereal vocals that issue forth from belabela.
“Blood” reveals the nuance with which belabela could conjure up such bewitching atmospheres. Filling them with synthetic textures and roiling bass that served to punctuate and illuminate the engrossing and gushing emotionality of her lyrics.
“My partner left me and I was upset,” belabela said of the song. “I needed to wear blood-red lipstick around this person. He never saw me without it. I was having intrusive thoughts about sex and I wanted him out of my brain. I would go to this church across the street from my school and take naps underneath the Virgin Mary. I just kept imagining having sex with this person. I felt evil.”
Joining “Blood” will be belabela’s second single “Lilith” which arrives later this month. In “Lilith,” she invokes the story of Adam’s first wife as a means of drawing on a darker but viscerally empowering feminine energy. One that ends up being both a love song and a rousingly defiant engagement of patriarchal figureheads.
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Visit belabela on her Instagram to stay updated on forthcoming releases. A foundation has also been set up in her memory in order to donate to causes she believed in.
Words: Steven Ward
Listen to “Blood” the new single from belabela below!
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