Melissa Harris, a multi-talented musician, singer, songwriter and producer from Chicago, has announced the release of a new single and video titled “My Little Dark” under her conceptual darkwave synth-pop project, Born Days.
This captivating song is the title track of Harris’ forthcoming album called “My Little Dark.” The record is a fusion of neo-psychedelia and goth pop, created by Harris in her personal studio and wardrobe. This will be her first full-length album, paying homage to the mysterious and ghostly apparitions that reside in the hidden corners of our minds.
Weaving a tapestry of influences from alternative, darkwave, dreampop, and gothic lineage, Harris masterfully orchestrates an auditory symphony of mellow, shadowed, and weathered tones. This fusion harmonizes elements of grunge, post-punk, neo-psychedelia, shoegaze, and contemporary pop. Drenched in nostalgia and profound intimacy, “My Little Dark” navigates the tempest of mental turbulence, traumatic scars, recurring destruction, love’s complexity, lost innocence, and more.
Harris’s sweet, gentle voice is imbued with a celestial aura, bursting into cataclysmic climaxes, receding into spectral innocence. Her compositions brim with spectral hues, ethereal wisps, and dystopian panoramas that stir a yearning for a time when life was more pristine and radiant.
“This song is about an extremely personal and complex relationship that is so interwoven and binding that there is no beginning and end,” says the artist. “Have you ever been caught in a dark and lonely place that you have built inside your heart? Through creating this song, I discovered that I have a say in how my destiny will play out despite everything that happened in the past.”
Born Days‘ lyrics paint a journey of self-confrontation and introspection, indicating an uneasy truce with one’s darker self. This internal struggle, balanced between protection and pain, reflects the duality of self-love and self-harm. The lyrics hint at a profound journey through existential musings and life’s brutal realities. However, despite this weighty exploration, the vocals deliver the message with an ethereal, mournfully buoyant quality, adding emotional complexity to the song.
The lyrics personify the protagonist’s inner darkness and self-hatred, depicting a tumultuous struggle with themselves. However, they still commit to self-protection, offering solace amid the harsh realities of life and death. It underlines the introspective search for a reason amidst life’s suffering, reflecting the cyclical battle within.
The remarkable video, artfully directed by Johannes Helgelin, puts an anime spin on the classic Little Red Riding Hood narrative. In a stunning exploration of a child’s imagination, this captivating journey presents a little girl navigating through metaphorical dreamscapes symbolizing our deepest fears – from eerie forests teeming with menacing specters and monsters, to overwhelming war machines, and a desolate landfill. It’s a poignant, masterfully executed visual feast.
Watch “My Little Dark” below:
“My Little Dark” is a saga birthed from a journey spanning years and miles. Born Days, Harris’ experimental music persona since 2017, serves as her catharsis, a conduit to articulate her emotions, ruminate on past experiences, and heal from trauma’s labyrinth, seeking to reunite with the pristine innocence intrinsic to nature’s rhythm. The advent of Covid, however, cast a pall of silence on her creative process. Stricken by acute agoraphobia and crippling anxiety, Harris found herself imprisoned within her small, whisper-thin walled sanctuary in Chicago. The realization that her home studio was now unviable for recording dawned on her. As the city’s cacophony invaded every crevice of her recording space, she developed a heightened sensitivity to sounds, momentarily hindering her ability to record and mix her music. Unwilling to surrender to adversity, Harris packed her musical arsenal into her car, setting off on a spontaneous transcontinental drive. This journey led her to a secluded desert haven where she committed to relentless recording sessions, ten hours daily for three months, within a tiny closet-sized refuge.
The fruits of her labor, born between the Arizona sands and her Illinois home studio, feature Harris as the singular force behind the project – the lyricist, producer, vocalist, and instrumentalist maneuvering the guitar, bass, synths, and samplers. “My Little Dark” is a confession of vulnerability and emotional depth, a concept album that taps into the raw introspective poetry of Sylvia Plath and Dr. Seuss’s innocent charm. It weaves a mystical, sci-fi bildungsroman of a young woman battling her self-imposed psychological confines. Laden with mysticism and melancholy, Harris’s ethereal voice dissipates into shadowy symphonic expanses, propelled by dreamlike, synth-heavy polyrhythms. This constructs a cinematic electronic pop narrative imbued with moody, nebulous textures.
Born Days’ My Little Dark is out on October 6, 2023
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