gazelle twin

Known for gazing unblinkingly into the abyss, Gazelle Twin is taking on the dark hound of her soul during this brilliantly claustrophobic and magnificently unsettling demon battle.

'Black Dog' is an album about confronting fear, and the expectation that the things that lurked in the darkness when you were a child will disappear as you become an adult. 'Black Dog' tells a story that unfurls like a film. It addresses how our childhoods shaped our adulthoods: how any sense of trauma and grief is burnished onto a person’s memories forever, however much we try and escape it. 'Black Dog' suggests how these feelings return in particular intensity when a person becomes a parent, as they watch themselves pass things on that they wish they hadn’t, wish they wouldn’t. In some ways, Bernholz is purging herself on this album. Unlike her masked characters for previous releases, her face is recognisable and, she explains, she is “not as removed this time” from her persona.

She is imagining herself as a medium for the voices inside herself, rather than looking out to displace them with other ideas. She emerges huge and godly as she does so, her voice moving from delicate tenderness to doom-driven power. This is an album where old stories have to be pillaged, digested, and regurgitated to write new ones, where we have to question ourselves utterly. 'Black Dog' looks back and looks in and looks back and looks in. We enter as we listen. We turn ourselves inside-out altogether.