Frankie Rose has announced her sixth album, Hila, arriving September 18 through Born Losers Records everywhere outside Europe and the UK, and through Night School Records within them. Alongside the announcement, she has shared a self-directed video for “Return To Dust,” the album’s second single.
Searching in Dreams
Rose filmed, produced and edited the “Return To Dust” video herself. The song sets her voice high in the mix against drum machines, synthesizers and reverbed guitar, with the low end carrying most of the weight underneath. She has described it as a song about searching for the dead while asleep, and failing at it. “I travel the cosmos and the astral realm looking for ones I’ve lost,” she said of the dreams that shaped the track. The video follows that same idea outward, tracking her image through open space rather than staying grounded in any single setting.
She frames the album itself around the same territory: a record built on what persists beyond ordinary perception, and the place mourning keeps circling back to. Grief, on Hila, isn’t treated as something to resolve so much as a condition that destabilizes perception, opening up possibilities that daylight tends to rule out.
Early coverage has picked up on that same unsteadiness. Post-Punk.com, a site covering post-punk, goth and darkwave music, wrote that “Return To Dust” carries “intense emotional gravity,” and pointed to touchstones ranging from Enya’s suspended grandeur to the severity of PJ Harvey and the gloom of Portishead, with the guitar and vocal work recalling Cocteau Twins and Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Fifteen Years In
Rose has spent close to two decades in New York’s independent music circles. She started out as a drummer, playing in Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls and Vivian Girls before stepping out as a bandleader and songwriter in her own right. She was later one half of the duo Beverly, alongside a solo catalog that includes Interstellar (which earned a Best New Music nod from Pitchfork), Herein Wild, Cage Tropical, a track-for-track cover of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, and her most recent album, Love As Projection.
Hila follows extensive touring behind that last record, including supporting slots with The Jesus and Mary Chain and Swervedriver. Rose made the new album entirely at her own home studio, bringing in drummer Justin Welch, who has played with Elastica and Lush, along with saxophonist Jeff Tobias. Where Love As Projection was an outward-facing record, reaching toward the world, Hila turns inward, tracking how loss reshapes the senses rather than simply naming it.
That shift plays out across ten tracks: “Olo,” “Cant Be Wrong,” “Return To Dust,” “Shadow Twin,” “Rainman,” “Hila,” “Manifest,” “Best Of Times,” “TV Star” and “Velvet Refrain.” “Cant Be Wrong,” the album’s first single, leans into a bright, funk-inflected pop sound that carries over from her last record. “Return To Dust” pulls the album into darker territory from there, and Rose has said the record grows heavier and more expansive as it goes, closing out on “Velvet Refrain” with something closer to release than resolution.
A Restless Kind of Search
What holds this album together is the restlessness of it. “Return To Dust” doesn’t land anywhere by the end; it just keeps looking, which fits a record more interested in the process of grieving than in tidy conclusions about it. For readers who’ve tracked Rose’s catalog through its shifts from lo-fi rock to 80s-inflected synth pop, Hila reads like a continuation of that arc rather than a reinvention of it, pushed into darker, more interior terrain.
Rose heads out this fall in support of The Charlatans UK, with the run of dates opening in San Diego. Hila is out September 18 on Born Losers Records and Night School Records.
Learn More
Frankie Rose on her Official Website
Hila on Bandcamp
Born Losers Records
