Vera Sola twists the singer-songwriter rulebook in fascinating directions on ‘The Colony’

Every weekday, DIY’s new music know-it-all Neu brings you one essential new release to get obsessed with. Today’s Neu Pick comes from Vera Sola.

New York/Canada-based songwriter Vera Sola - aka Danielle Aykroyd - is releasing her debut album ‘Shades’ in November. Today’s Neu Pick comes in the form of new track ‘The Colony’, which comes along with its own beautiful black-and-white video.

The track sees the newcomer taking a base from country-tinged folk music, and twisting it in newer, darker directions: it’s a fascinating and compelling twist on a well-travelled formula. The feeling of the track is amped up even further by the video, which sees a veiled woman gliding her way through a desert.

“I wrote ‘The Colony’ very quickly last fall in the days following my return from a while spent supporting native water protectors at Standing Rock,” the singer says of the new track. “It is loosely the story of America, sung from the perspective of the collective white colonial consciousness. It was important to me in the studio that the lead vocal was delivered in a dismissive tone of casual entitlement, and that the background vocals served as a heavy counterpoint: a choir of the souls who suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of the invading oppressor. Voices stripped of language, and left to howl, relegated to the background, yet providing the very foundation of the song, and by metaphorical extension, this country. The whole thing is of course an indictment—a paean to the land and her people.”

Speaking of the video, directed by Damon James Duke at Bombay Beach, she says: “I wanted to, as I did on the recording, embody both white colonist and physicalised spirit of the stolen country and it’s first inhabitants. I wanted the setting to convey the sublimity of nature while emphasising its dissection by industrialism. The boats that brought the first Europeans. The trains that crisscross and divide the land, bear the cargo of capitalism and the individuals that would stake claim to wherever they stepped off the platform. The highways and the power plants and oil derricks and power lines that mark and mar the plains and deserts and forests. Aerial footage seemed key here—a watching from above as if from the perspective of floating souls.”

Watch the video for ‘The Colony’ below.