Four years after the release of The Turning Wheel (2021), Tia Cabral dares to fiddle with the work of God in Portrait of My Heart (2025, Sacred Bones Records); creating a unique record in her catalogue that takes distance with their predecessors without losing identity. Cabral is cautious in Portrait of my Heart: the tracks are short, direct (never simple) and blooming with restraint.

If hope, optimism, magic, faith and phantasy were the traits of The Turning Wheel, this record focuses on the anxieties of love and identity, but it doesn’t stay there, it doesn’t give a solution to the maladies of love but offers a conversation with herself about them.

Cabral is, as she is in the cover of The Turning Wheel, Spellling and the Mystery School (2023) and Portrait of My Heart, in the centre of a universe created and held by her, everything else seems to be discovered and challenged. In the first track (the song has the same title as the record) we are introduced to the main tropes of the album: alienation and the fortunes and misfortunes of love.  On ‘Keep it alive’, there’s self-hate and dissatisfaction expressed in a cry for help for the lover to “get me out of this ordinary life”.

One of the things that struck me the most from this record, is the protagonist presence of Wyatt Overson.  The riffs paint the canvas of the album with energy and brightness in almost every track that features a guitar.

Some weeks ago, on my way back from work, I stumbled upon a white rabbit having a wee munch in a square of grass near a council estate. The rabbit was a bit unkempt, but didn’t look neglected. I approached the white dude; it glanced at me uninterested and continued chewing. I took a photo with my phone and enthusiastically told my flatmate about it. Weeks later, same scenario: coming back from work, pain in both my feet and back and the white dude chilling. The connection with ‘Ammunition’ was immediate and effective. What sense can we give to these lyrics? I don’t know and I don’t care; so let’s exploit the elusive Bressonian formula: it’s not about understanding, but feeling.  What is it that I felt? Some kind of connection with Cabral’s lyrics that do not make sense in a rational way, but they do when they are thought in the frame of chance and random. Is this the work of magic?

In ‘Alibi’ and ‘Waterfall’ there’s a sense of escaping the past but not without scars: ‘Waterfall’: “I don’t want to stay / In the world he left behind”. A constant search in the shadows for that imago of the lover that is now gone: ‘Alibi’: “Searching for your face in the shadows, why? / It’s a light, of the darkest kind /Staring at the edge of the knife, / I’m going crazy”.

Throught the album there are constant references to falling into holes and “a drain in my mind”, love (again), we can interpret, as this force that attract two lovers, asking for shelter, care and tenderness. There are no masks, Cabral is intimate in her reflections. We are witnessing Cabral’s reflection of love through different lenses: soul, heart, chemical reactions: “on a rush so chemical”: ‘Love ray eyes’.

Portrait of My Heart not only covers love (‘Mount Analogue’, ‘Love Ray Eyes’) and alienation but how Cabral places herself in those spaces. The only way the album can finish is with a cover of another song that touches this with tenderness and static: Sometimes by My Bloody Valentine. A clear betrayal against the shoegaze Gods, Spellling has desecrated the holiness of the gospels of shoegaze and spat out her own interpretation, she has ridden the holy bull and has invited us to witness this holy desecration: you can hear Cabral’s voice and distinguish what she is singing. (You even have a background voice singing “turned hearts to love!”; oh glory!). Only by killing the parents one is able to move one.

Cabral will perform in Manchester in June at the Pink Room at YES. If not my favourite venue, by far the best toilets of Charles Street. Never the ones downstairs, you always end up stepping on a puddle of wee, always aim to the ones of the Pink Room.

Portrait of My Heart is an album that seems complete, finished, with its splinters well-polished. Where The Turning Wheel is more certain about its fantasy, Portrait of My Heart is insecure about itself (insecurity will never be detrimental, but a drive).

Spellling: Portrait of My Heart – Out 28 March 2025 (Sacred Bones Records)

SPELLLING – Alibi (Official Audio)