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Alternative, lo-fi, indie, singer-songwriter, London.

Eleni Drake’s “CHUCK” finds beauty in letting go. 

There’s a stillness to Eleni Drake’s CHUCK that emulates the calming silence that comes after a moment of surrender. Drake’s debut full-length album, out now, feels like a simultaneous reckoning and a release, a tender conversation with the parts of ourselves that linger after love, pain, and acceptance collide.

For Drake, CHUCK arrived as both an ending and a beginning, marking her first full length album since signing onto record label MNRK, having previously been completely self-produced. “I’ve been releasing my own music since 2020,” she says in an interview with Culture Cabinet. “I never really thought about labels, it was never something that, when I first started making music, I was even considering. I was just making it because I loved making music.” That love carried her through years of independent releases, recorded entirely from the intimacy of her bedroom. Though, the milestone of signing onto MNRK marked a shift. “Maybe that cemented me taking myself a little bit more seriously again,” she reflects. “Being with a label kind of opened up a few more avenues in terms of how I was recording things. This album was actually the very first time I managed to record inside of a music studio instead of my bedroom, so that was a big change for me.”

Drake’s previous EP, Above Deep Water, hinted at the emotional depth she’d continue to explore. But CHUCK feels different in the sense that it feels more reflective, more raw. “When I signed my label, what they requested from me was an EP and an album,” she explains. “I had quite a long time to write the album, and I was kind of freaking out because I hadn’t written anything since my last EP. Then all of a sudden, pretty much at the end of August or beginning of September last year, I’d written all of the songs in the space of a month.”

The title came later, carrying dual meanings of both the spiritual and cinematic. “The reason why I had chosen CHUCK was for two reasons,” she says. “One of them was because of [to ‘chuck’ is] to throw something away, to discard something. And the other one was actually because I was watching a TV series called Pushing Daisies. The main female lead in there is called Chuck. The love story [in the show] is basically the lead characters trying to find ways to be intimate with each other, because they end up falling in love and can’t touch. There are other ways of loving someone, it doesn’t have to be intimate.”

That idea of connection beyond contact, of holding without clinging threads through every song. Drake initially thought she’d take the record in a heavier direction. “Before I started writing the album, I wanted to go a bit heavier with it,” she says. “That was kind of my plan. And it didn’t end up going that way. I kind of just let the music speak for itself.” The result is something more instinctive, as if she followed the emotion wherever it led. “I thought it was going to go one way. It ended up going a completely different way. But when I was writing the songs, at no point was I like, ‘No, no, this should be like this.’ I just kind of let it happen.”

For an artist who’s long captured heartbreak in chiaroscuro tones, the soft ache between resignation and grace, CHUCK serves as a mirror. “I never listen to my own music when I’m alone,” she admits. “The time where it’s excavated for me, and I think about that stage in my life, is probably when I’m either rehearsing for shows or playing a show. I’ve been known to cry on stage because I’m back there, I’m transported back to that time.”

Drake laughs about it, insisting the tears aren’t dramatic, but her honesty is disarming. “I’m working on it,” she says. “I need to be a little bit more stable.” But CHUCK thrives in those fragile spaces where control gives way to feeling, and where remembering doesn’t have to hurt.

As she prepares to tour, there’s both anticipation and ache, as visa issues have (hopefully temporarily) put her plans for an American tour on pause. For now, she’ll bring CHUCK to UK stages, where the songs can finally “breathe a bit of life into the world instead of just my laptop.” She smiles at the thought. “I’m excited for people to listen to them and to relate to them, or at least come away from it going, ‘Okay, at least that was honest of her.’”

That honesty is the heartbeat of CHUCK: unguarded and forgiving, willing to see beauty in what couldn’t last. “Even though things don’t work out the way you hoped they would,” Drake says of what she hopes listeners take away, “you can still reflect back on those moments and see beauty in them. We don’t have to villainize someone in our story just because they did a few things wrong. We can also leave those moments and go, ‘Hey, that was shit, sure, but that was beautiful.’”

Tracks:
01. A Wonder Day
02. Half Alive
03. Paper Moons
04. Alone
05. Dolores
06. Brockwell
07. Leroy
08. The End
09. Afterlife
10. Ripples
11. I Don't Not Love You
12. Saw It Too

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF3Dhc9S82g