Having performed live on stages shared with Jarvis Cocker and Imogen Heap, Bellatrix has been featured by the likes of Wonderland, Clash and Dummy. And whilst she has been on my radar for a little while, it is the brutal honesty of iPhone really takes her sound to another level, in the process pushes all my buttons.
Drawing on the kind of alt-pop sound I have grown to love from the likes of Empress Of and Dev Hynes, iPhone fizzes with a glitchy, infectious energy. Soft focus synths gently drop a reflective melody as Bellatrix sings about WhatsApp groups and the Northern Line, invoking a pedestrian background for Bellatrix’s internal anxiety.
The central melody on iPhone reminds me of the sublime title track from Thom Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, in a great way… And the irony is that whilst the songs are tonally distinct, they both feel concerned with a determination to move through a level of existential dread. Yorke’s “The more you try to erase me…” echoed in Bellatrix’s “Don’t forget me… Please believe my love”. I’m almost sure these echoes exist only in my head, and yet they make a sort of perfect coupling of intelligent pop records.
iPhone is lifted from Bellatrix’s forthcoming EP, I Was An Aphid, the name of which is a reference to Audre Lorde’s 1978 observation that "women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance to their masters”. Check out iPhone below: