To celebrate Pride, we’ll be highlighting a different Irish artist from the LGBTQIA+ community each day in June as part of our Pride Profiles series.
By Hannah Quearney
Listen If You Like:
Caroline Polachek, Julia Holter, U.S. Girls
Who She Is:
The lustrous sophistication of HALLI’s art-pop persuasions have been celebrated on a global scale — from its sleek production or emotionally taut themes, to the likes of FKA Twigs and Angel Olsen being lauded as Sad Girl denizens and confessional lyricists in the same breath. With much excitement, it’s looking like the Dublin musician is next in the ranks to uphold the gilded torch.
HALLI’s music makes us nostalgic for encounters that we’ve never experienced before. Her short discography serves as a synth-soaked ephemera from a time settled neither in the distant past or looming future. Glimpses of vulnerability are received through star-studded vignettes, screenshots from a coming-of-age film, and old film photographs all at once. The musical smokescreen HALLI has constructed is minimalist but prioritises sensibility, neatly wrapped together with transient reverb and a lit cigarette.
Earlier this year, she released her second single “Body Never Lies.” Prioritising restoration and intimacy, HALLI muses on the fragility of our physical selves and how that will always parallel how it’s being treated. To say that it lacks the danceability of her later releases would be slightly misguided, with the single ebbing and flowing the same way that our bodies do. It serves as a reminder of how everything we do is attuned to a rhythm of some kind, from the pulse of our heartbeat to the staggering mechanics of a drum machine.
Listen to “Body Never Lies” below.
Nameless Faceless 