NEW ARTIST FINDS: BELA PIERCE
Lakeland, FL’s Bela Pierce gets personal with her pop-infused, electronic singer/songwriter ballads, like shadows melting into the sunlight.
The best Pop Music knows how to blend intimacy and populism, taking a detail from the artist’s life and making it relatable to a wide swathe of humanity. Making world class indie pop is its own artform, a delicate balancing act, giving just enough of the artist to make it human, personal, and unique, instead of just more generic corporate pop music to shift units and sell sneakers.
Lakeland, FL’s Bela Pierce performs this balancing act masterfully, like some tightrope walker striding across the abyss of electronic experimentalism and heartwrenching emotions with heady beats and deep, dark sub-bass, as can be heard on her debut single, “Free.”
BELA PIERCE - FREE
Bela Pierce is a self-made musician, coming from a non-musical background, becoming the black sheep of her family. Pierce discovered the therapeutic value of expressing one’s self, of finding one’s own voice, own words, and discovering one’s own self along the way.
Speaking on her debut single, “Free,” breezy and emotive with gentle acoustic guitar and clouds of distant vocal harmonies, like dark clouds over a lagoon teeming with herons and cranes, yet stomping and driving with a genuinely satisfying downbeat and glowing, neon synths, Bela Pierce told the website PurpleMelonMu.com, “I wrote it in sort of a dark season of life. Had a bad relationship experience + was really just trying to figure myself out and grow. I’m a deep feeler, so I tend to write down my emotions a lot, and this one started off as a poem. One night i was in my room & pulled out my guitar and came up with a melody to it, and it just worked. Focusing on the production aspect of the song, the lyrical depth is sort of disguised; but once you strip away the good vibes and really listen to the words, I hope listeners can feel and sense the vulnerability expressed and share that sense of freedom with me.”
“Free” is available now on all major digital music platforms, including iTunes and Spotify, and is already reaping tons of praise and earning Bela Pierce a ton of fans! She’s a total shoe-in for Best New Artist, here on We Are: The Guard - an indie musician with something distinctive and personal to say, but knowing how to say it in just that right way, that we all can relate to.
J. Simpson occupies the intersection between criticism, creativity, and academia. Based out of Portland, Or., he is the author of Forestpunk, an online journal/brand studying the traces of horror, supernatural, and the occult through music, fashion and culture. He plays in the dreamfolk band Meta-Pinnacle with his partner Lily H. Valentine, with whom he also co-founded Bitstar Productions, a visual arts collective focused on elevating Pop Culture to High Art.