[Cover photo credit to Nicole Ngai]
Brighton, UK-based songwriter Helen Ganya has announced her new album polish the machine for release on November 18th, 2022 via Bella Union. To celebrate the announcement Ganya has shared a video for first single “afterparty” which features professional dancers Gemma Shrub and Natasha Margerison. The video was choreographed by Ceyda Tanc who mixes contemporary dance works with influences from Turkish folk culture.
For Helen Ganya, entering her thirties made her “question and pull away from the heteronormative social constructs that surround us”. On her new album polish the machine, she “stretches away from the suburban nightmare, seeking a cathartic reprieve that looks beyond the ordinary”.
polish the machine “refuses to succumb to despondency”, instead pursuing a platform for “community and tentative optimism”.
Ganya explains:
I’ve always slightly feared the ordinary. It never really represented how I feel and how many people feel.
The song “afterparty” addresses the often “overwhelming feelings that often overtake us during… moments of in-between, of unknowing”.
Ganya comments on the song:
I envisioned this actual space of disappointment. But I’m here, still hoping for something better.
The new album sets out “to craft a window into a world where the universal existential pull is acknowledged but not permitted to overwhelm” and “to liberate ourselves from the fear, anger and anxiety that so often isolates us through a kind of cathartic communion”.
