Being in a band can be pretty nice, right? For years, SPELLLING’s Tia Cabral went at it alone. Her 2017 debut Pantheon of Me was powered by an aura of darkwave synths created in isolation, and 2019’s Mazy Fly introduced live percussion, splashes of strings, and sax into her repertoire. Still, Cabral mostly relied on her trusty Juno-106 for the album’s architecture. 2021’s The Turning Wheel was a Cambrian Explosion—a sudden leap from gothic gray to vibrant color. On it, she paired her ethereal singing with harp, bassoon, clarinet, French horn, and all the other flourishes of a 31-piece orchestra. “She’s very good at hearing it all already, and then telling you how she wants it to go,” Cabral’s bassist Giulio Xavier Cetto said in a 2023 interview. Though, even with more bells and whistles, there’s a difference between collaborating and directing. The Turning Wheel was the latter.
And then, Cabral formed the band. To tour The Turning Wheel, Cabral brought together guitarist Wyatt Overson, drummer Patrick Shelley, and Cetto to become her touring group, named The Mystery School. She released SPELLLING and the Mystery School, which reinterpreted selections from her earlier catalog with the looseness of a live performance. That album served as a clear break in Cabral’s discography—gone was the haunting shroud of her solitary work.
Portrait of My Heart is SPELLLING’s first album of new material in nearly four years. The shift in style is immediately obvious. Where The Turning Wheel’s opener, “Little Deer,” once sauntered in like the overture to a Broadway musical, “Portrait of My Heart” announces itself here with a drum beat that skips and gallops. “I don’t belong here,” Cabral careens over the chorus, remaining in complete control as bandleader. The toolkit is just different: chamber-pop eschewed in favor of hard riffs and anthemic ballads. For SPELLLING, Portrait of My Heart is refreshingly direct, the work of an ambitious artist discovering the thrill of making music with a band for the first time.
And Cabral takes full advantage of her band’s kinetic energy. For the album’s first four tracks, she is on a tear—belting peak-Avril-level hooks on “Alibi” and “Waterfall,” and howling while “Keep It Alive” closes with an instrumental break. SPELLLING has been shelved under the label “experimental pop” for years, though her music has so rarely occupied guitar-rock spaces. These songs change that, as her righteous rage places her in the lineage of artists like Alanis or Hayley Williams: angst set to big melodies for big crowds. Cabral tinkers with her band to drift into pop-punk territory: Turnstile’s Pat McCrory’s power chords add some heft on “Alibi” and Zulu guitarist Braxton Marcellous sends “Drain” to the rafters with a chugging outro. The role of a rock star suits her.
That’s not to say that Cabral abandons her theatrical flair. That flair just has more in common with a dramatic power ballad than whimsical divinity. The trio of ballads at the center of Portrait of My Heart might seem like the material that most closely resembles Cabral’s earlier work. But “Destiny Arrives,” “Ammunition,” and the Chaz Bear-assisted “Mount Analogue” are more open-hearted and unambiguous than anything off The Turning Wheel. She sings to the back of the room with the full power of her pipes; the drums are soft and pillowy; her synths set the atmosphere like a smoke machine. Frankly, these songs aren’t so far off from something Heart did in the ‘80s. They work for the same reason that those arena-rock sing-alongs do: It’s impossible not to get swept up in the glorious, note-perfect schmaltz.
Of course, with something gained, there is something lost. Lyrically, Cabral abandons the elusiveness that littered her previous work—the little deer, the “boys at school,” the “emperor with an egg in his feathers.” The Turning Wheel is an album to draw you in. It’s a terrain to explore, and it offers no clear answers. Portrait of My Heart displays Cabral’s full emotional intensity with bullseye-like precision. It’s obvious. When she sings a line like “Give me something real to live for,” or “I won’t take you back this time,” she says exactly what she means.
Because of that, SPELLLING loses the mystique that made her such a compelling presence. What was otherworldliness is now world-weariness, allowing for Portrait of My Heart to sit nicely along other art-pop pieces of the 2020s, like Cassandra Jenkins’s My Light, My Destroyer, Cate Le Bon’s Pompeii, and Perfume Genius’s Set My Heart on Fire Immediately. Thematically, Cabral meditates on loneliness and isolation and, while the album’s directness works for her, ironically, it puts her in the same category as everyone else. Portrait of My Heart closes with a faithful cover of my bloody valentine’s “Sometimes.” All the tension of the album melts down into the shoegaze classic’s gauzy guitar. This album cooks with gas until it burns out. SPELLLING’s rock album thrills, but Cabral’s spell isn’t quite as entrancing as it was. Familiarity kills the magic—that is, until she transforms again.
Read: “The Second Version of SPELLLING”
Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Twitter.
