VEiiLA: Can’t Forgive Myself b/w Another Day (digital single)

Product Description

The first single from VEiiLA’s new album Sentimental Craving For Beauty coming September 8th, 2023, on Projekt Records.

Genres: Dark Cold Wave, Downtempo, Alternative Pop, Electronic, Bleak House, Dream Pop, Trip Hop, Witch House
For Fans Of: Emika, The XX, Zola Jesus, Sevdaliza
Hometown: Vanadzor, Armenia

[VEiiLA is pronounced “Vay-la.” It’s a stylized reference to a Baltic mountain-dwelling demon that lures men into her cave by singing and then devours them.]

Creating beauty and passion out of harrowing despair comes easy for Russians-in-exile VEiiLA. With immaculate electronics, slow rhythms, and female vocals flush with late-night sensuality, the duo of Bes Eirid and Vif Nüte craft an entwining melancholia with devastating existential lyrics.

In anticipation of their Sentimental Craving For Beauty album, VEiiLA reveals two advance tracks with a bare minimalist palette — the stripped down production clears space for the vocals’ hypnotic swirl, murmuring their intimate allegories of universal indifference and lost hope.

“Can’t Forgive Myself” investigates themes of regret. Regret of a specific quality caused by childlike naivety mistaking cynical manipulations of the grown-up world for genuine kindness and decency. Everyone gets to this epiphany when growing up, and almost everyone manages to grow a thick layer of skin — vigilant skepticism with scoffing disdain for the mere idea of purity. But what about those who don’t grow up? Those whose innocent beliefs survive and linger? Those who cherish their immature idealism to the last, forever opposing it to the vulgarity of real life? Well, life is life and sooner or later everyone has to face it.

Under the surface of the seemingly unpretentious lounge ballad “Another Day” dwells what may be one of VEiiLA’s gloomiest songs. With melancholic detachment, Vif’s soft vocals rest on a minimal underwater arrangement that forces the ear to pay attention to the desperate lyrics. Revolving thematically around lies, VEiiLA presents lying as the last resort in the game of clinging to life.

Hidden beneath seductive mellow electronics, translucent guitars, soft enthralling percussion, synth bass and tantalizing, alluring vocals dwell the paralyzing vapors of venomous despair and inevitable pain of human existence. All of which is contrasted by a catchy beat and sensual downtempo context.

I’m lying to you
And I’m lying to myself
There’s nothing I can do
There’s nothing to be said
And I’m lying to you
And I’m lying to myself
Cause if we don’t believe
Then we’re already dead

Projekt release: August 18 2023