Hellena doesn’t just put out a song with her latest single “I CUT OUT NICOTINE AND I DON’T LIKE BRANDY,” she released a statement.
Track 10 from her bright new album Harmonia, this song is at once emotionally sprawling, the UK-based artist at her most confessional. The track finds Hellena trading smoke rings and spirits for self-liberation. Hellena unpacks the symbolic stripping away of bad habits. Nicotine and brandy. For stagnation. For escapism. For who she used to be. As the title indicates, she is done with all that. The production is as genre-fractious as it is emotionally accurate. Harmonies ride over a heartbeat of throbbing electro-pop beats, layered with a gentle sprinkle of live instrumentation. It’s that trademark Hellena modern but mystical, digital but somehow deeply human. Her sound contorts and morphs. The message illustrates letting go does not mean losing yourself. It means finally meeting who you truly are.
“I CUT OUT NICOTINE AND I DON’T LIKE BRANDY” finds itself in the wider hearing cosmos of Harmonia an album that took four years to craft, and which was well worth the wait. Like the rest of the record, the single traces the trajectory of a superheroine in the present day, splicing pop bravado to unapologetic rawness. It’s danceable, it’s introspective and it sounds like Hellena.
If Harmonia is a journey, this track is the point in the road where you unroll the cape from the closet and not to conceal its whooping but to levitate. Hellena stops whispering her power. Now, she sings it loud.