Making music and receiving publicity at a young age can put you in a box. Breaking that cage, pushing your new image and sound to the forefront, can be tough. Björk knows it best, as she underwent this transformation several times, when she needed to escape the image of a child singer from the cover of her 1977 album with bands like Sugarcubes or Kukl, then by releasing a post-jazz album to distance herself from bands, only to navigate the way to her 1993 Debut. More recently, Yung Lean created multiple personas to get rid of the idea of himself in a bucket hat drinking Arizona iced tea. We could continue the list.
Prague-based experimental pop project GbClifford can be placed in the same lineage of artists burning bridges. Although on the local scene, the project is presented as anonymous, the truth is rather a public secret. Amelie Siba, the artist behind GbClifford has a singer-songwriter career since their teenage years, often winning Czech music awards. But being seen by lazy music journalists only as a “little girl with a guitar” became claustrophobic. As a result, the musician erased the songs they wrote at high school, as if wanting to wipe out their younger self from the digital realm.
The name is a nod to the early 00s kids’ cartoon Clifford the Big Red Dog, with its opening initialism offering a forlorn ‘goodbye’ to childhood. The new record deals with this anxiety and tension through deep stretches of distorted digital noise and ironic use of samples from self-care YouTubers. But the experimental side of the record does not bury the pop sensibility. It tests the boundaries between noise and pop, in a similar way to Yves Tumor’s recent alt-pop records. Moreover, GbClifford’s live performances, which had previously opened around Czechia for bands like Moin or The Body & Dis Fig, can be quite a visceral experience.
While GbClifford’s 2023 album Kingdom had auto-tuned singing that sounded disembodied, the vocals on My Heart are distanced and still heavily effected, but shine more, as if GbClifford was starting to accommodate the new persona. As in the stand-out track, ‘Say Sorry’, driven by a scattered drum line, where the vocal is at times unadorned. “I’m so here for you / Though I’m so tired of singing love songs,” GbClifford confesses in ‘Loversong’.
Sometimes My Heart evokes early Zola Jesus or Freddy Ruppert’s Former Ghosts, but GbClifford lacks the gothic and retro style of both those projects. It is evident the album was made in this decade: the urban melancholy of the new Mancunian scene around the White Hotel is woven into the fabric of the songs. Elsewhere distorted strings, as in ‘Exhale’, reveal South London inspirations, specifically from composers like Klein.
These references seem to be unconscious, appearing more like déjà vu, but they provide the emotional pulse of the album. GbClifford achieves this downbeat drama of adolescent angst and grown-up melancholy sound truly empowering. My Heart Is Bigger Than the Grief Inside of It feels shy and intimate, still these songs reach out.
