PHEA has created an empowering journey through words and sounds on her brand-new extended-play Healing Hearts. The five-track project is an energetic and fierce listen with dark undertones dealing with gut-wrenching and heart-punching topics that will turn heads. The alternative pop project has electric flavours with a production of electric guitar, synthesisers, alongside her beautiful vocals that bring every story to light.
In the same way every story cannot be taken in, in one read, PHEA delicately portrays a multi-layered and complex story through her artistry creating an evoking mood to be reckoned with, challenged, and embraced on Healing Hearts.
Going back to the beginning of this project, 2021 was a difficult time for PHEA. She was in-between healing from the last and an upcoming operation for her implanted defibrillator when she met David John Levy to write the focus track ‘Breaking Bones’.
During the operation, it is routine to stop the heart to test if the implanted defibrillator will start it again. She was able to let go of her natural fear of dying and focus on her strengths when she wrote, “Keep on breaking my bones, hoping my skeleton can hold. If I just don’t wake up. Tell them I gave it my all,” expressing her emotions in ‘Breaking Bones’.
PHEA and David basically finished the track in one session. Picking the sounds and adding the polarity of a heavy and haunting part and an atmospheric chorus came natural. They played around with some samples she had made with modular systems and quickly arranged a beat that fit the emotions she wanted to express. They ended up using the demo vocals and some because they were more emotional than anything they tried to record later on.
‘Breaking Bones’ is PHEA’s way of giving her body credit for everything it has been put through and showcasing its power to heal, and so is her EP Healing Hearts.
Each song showcases PHEA’s strengths, weaknesses, and overcoming obstacles that led her to where she is today, meanwhile facing her past with confidence and graciousness.
PHEA comments on the EP, “With ‘Healing Hearts’ and the focus track ‘Breaking Bones’, I try to take my weaknesses and turn them into strengths. For the longest time, I felt my chronic illness and disability is a weakness that I would try to hide. Which made me suffer mentally as well. The EP has allowed me to make art from my physical and mental pain. Writing music changed my relationship with my body. I am working on not being resentful towards it and seeing my ability to heal as my biggest strength. I hope others can find comfort in my music, just like I find comfort in writing it.”
Tracklist
Running
I Saw You
Dark Thoughts
When I’m Falling
Breaking Bones
About PHEA
American-German singer-songwriter and producer PHEA transforms the painful and hopeless moments of her life into art. With her unique style of music, she drops deeply melodious grooves with meaningful lyrics that cast provocative light on human equality, PTSD, and sheer survival, inspired by her own rare heart condition.
As a survivor of potentially fatal Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, PHEA found expression and comfort in music and poetry in the years that followed her open-heart surgery and implantation of her first defibrillator, at the age of 10. Upon awakening from a medically induced coma, she emerged with battery operated, cyborg circuitry attached to her human heart.
PHEA’s music – unwound by her deeply messaged lyrics and bespoke soundscape – are the coalesced expression of her tumultuous life experiences. The self-written and produced, multi-layered tapestries she creates are simultaneously haunting and life-affirming. Her poetic lyricism evokes sounds of ancient folk traditions transported to modernity by a flying carpet of trip-hop-like beats, mercurially led by her synesthesia.
Much like fairies that inspire her aesthetic, PHEA sits between defined genres with a unique sound that is at once beautiful, delicate, powerful, and almost ethereal.
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