Christelle Bofale plays the sort of guitar chords you could swim in. The Congolese American songwriter grew up immersed in the sounds of soukous, a rumba-inspired genre of dance music from the Congo. She first started writing songs on her father’s guitar when she was 13 years old. Now 22 and living in Austin, she uses her instrument to trace vast spaces that couch thorny emotional quagmires. In its sumptuousness and delicacy, her debut EP Swim Team calls back to the way the Antlers float guitar lines through foggy air, or the ribboned arpeggios on Frank Ocean’s “Ivy.”
There are songs on Swim Team that soothe, letting the ear bathe in a warm glow even as Bofale describes intense pain. “I built a home for you/You tore it up,” she sings on “Love Lived Here Once,” her voice ringing through a sea of minor chords. The EP’s centerpiece “U Ouchea” grows slowly over seven and a half minutes, each new refrain bolstered by tighter, denser guitar lines. “I’m glowing with fear/I’m pregnant with fear/I’ve gotta get out of here,” Bofale sings, using the image of pregnancy to describe the toxicity that secretly attends so many romantic partnerships. A seemingly happy relationship can quietly harbor abuse; an externally tragic breakup can actually be a story of escape.
Swim Team treads the murky waters of violence disguised as love, and all the weird feelings that can emerge with such a relationship's destruction. “Origami Dreams,” the most straightforward pop-rock song, cruises along on a beat full of momentum and excitement. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry up,” Bofale sings at the chorus, as if impelling herself to get loose from all the history that’s weighing her down. She punctuates the refrain with a chain of notes on guitar that seem to point at some gleaming future, a place of calm and respite she's urging herself toward.
Healing from trauma generally isn’t a linear process. You don’t wake up a little better every day; some days you coil around yourself and collapse back into the sludge you're trying to escape. Bofale’s songs also wind in circles, reaching for peace and acceptance and then shrinking back into harsh reality. The way she plays guitar, layering chords on top of each other and sequencing them so they never quite seem to resolve, allows more than enough room for the complexity of her lyrics. She ends the record by repeating the words, “I am lost out here,” voice rising to a timbre that hangs between despair and thrill. She may be lost, but she is out here and not in there. In there, there's only suffocation. Out here, there are places she can go.
