Rebecca Helen’s new single, “Patterns In The Sky,” landed in my inbox, and honestly, I wasn’t expecting… this. This rising star from Cape Town – indie-pop, they say – has bottled something raw, something that spills out of the speakers and pools around your feet.
The theme? Grief. But not the movie version, with artfully placed single tears. This is the messy, inconvenient, “why did I leave the laundry in the dryer?” kind of grief. Helen somehow navigates the agonizing pain of loss, singing in a way that connects deep into ones sole. She croons of enduring love and memory, her words a desperate, beautiful attempt to piece together something shattered. Remember that feeling when you first saw Van Gogh’s “Starry Night?” It had me a similar, with a disorienting blend of beauty and utter chaos, it felt not so far off.
The song’s indie-pop bones support a surprisingly sturdy structure.
There are moments of profound lyrical simplicity that hit harder than any complicated metaphor ever could. Which made me think— do butterflies ever get lost? Probably not. They just go where the wind takes them, which in a way makes them far braver than me.
What’s surprising isn’t that Helen explores the idea of hope amidst the wreckage; It is the visceral way she conveys the hope for a connection that refuses to be severed by physical absence. It made my left ear itch. It feels personal, deeply human, I could picture my grandfather, whom I never met.
“Patterns In The Sky,” is a song that embraces the cracks and the echoes left behind. Will Rebecca Helen, and “Patterns In The Sky” fill stadiums? I’m pondering the profound significance. Maybe. And perhaps that’s the entire point.
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