Los Angeles-based artist Claire George will release her long-awaited debut album The Land Beyond The Light via Cascine on May 21st, and today she shares the final single off of the forthcoming record. Following “Pink Elephants” and “I Promise” is the gorgeous and heartbreaking “Northern Lights.” “I wrote ‘Northern Lights’ about someone I loved and lost to opioid addiction. I wanted to eternalize the memories we shared before they became distant or distorted, as they do when you retell or revisit them. After they passed, they appeared regularly in my dreams. Waking up I would relive the loss and beg for an alternate reality,” Claire explains. “The video came from one dream I had in which I was called up the floors of a house to an attic filled with light. The attic is where we store our memories, old photographs and cards we made for our mothers. To me this felt like a reminder to appreciate the memories, even as my grief is indelibly tied to them. In the video I wanted to give myself the chance to do what I cannot do in life: free myself of the grief. Wring it out and be left only with the light.”

On Monday, May 17th, Claire George will perform an acoustic set on Junior High’s Vans Channel 66 show at approximately 2:30 pm PT / 5:30 pm ET. The performance will air on Vans’ Channel 66, a digital livestream network broadcasting weekdays from New York City, Chicago, Mexico City, and Los Angeles to audiences around the world.
While Claire George’s stunning self-produced and self-written debut EP Bodies of Water was notable for its wide-eyed celestial synth-pop, The Land Beyond the Light delves deeper into George’s swath of dance and pop influences. The album was initially inspired by a 2019 heartbreak, but the tone and tenor of the writing process changed when George suddenly lost her friend, an ex-boyfriend, to substance abuse. The loss of this significant person in her life left George to reckon with questions of addiction and grief, while exploring new sonic vocabularies in which to house them. The result is an achingly human document of life; an album in turns ecstatic and elegiac.