There’s a particular kind of silence that falls over a city at 4am: the eerie emptiness of half-lit streets, the eventual hush of the night bus as the night finally ends. On angelism, Glasgow artist girldeath has captured that hush, that curious in-between, through a dark-ambient record that wanders through the emotional upheaval of things broken, and the quiet joy found in beginning again.

Stark but always absorbing, angelism didn’t begin life as an album. A lot of its earliest sounds were fragments, piano parts recorded long before any shape had formed, skewed samples buried deep in a hard drive of discarded works. But slowly, over time, a new sonic identity began to emerge. One that whispered rather than shouted, shifting beneath itself like a half-formed memory.

“I’m a big believer in the feeling that once you start a song, and you get a taste quite early on for what it could end up as, it’s like following a thread into what the song wants to end up being,” says Naomi, the artist behind the girldeath project. That instinct, to listen closely to what the music is trying to say, pulses throughout angelism. It’s a record made not by forcing ideas into place, but by giving them the time and space to unfurl.

Born from a year of duality, with one foot in heartbreak and the other in flourishing new love, angelism is the first girldeath album, and a new chapter for Naomi who’d been releasing music as Forest People since 2016. Deeply personal without ever turning confessional, the album moves like a dream, flickering between moods as the drifting drone-like textures roll on, the themes it explores grow and blossom and shrink again into the shadows. That emotional overlap, of endings becoming beginnings, makes for a textured and intimate listen, and one that always resists clean lines.

Although its emotional landscape is interior, angelism is also very-much a Glasgow record. It’s hard not to hear the city in the bones of the album; the concrete quiet of early morning;  the echo of club culture and post-rave emptiness; the static traffic of the Kingston Bridge where the album title itself was born.

True to its name, angelism feels ghostly and diffused, both frayed and radiant. Taking inspiration from the likes of Grouper, Tim Hecker, and Claire Rousay, it exists in a liminal space between ambient and drone, where dark textures are stretched and buried under layers of prickly noise that threatens but never fully envelops. 

Crafted largely through night sessions, experimenting under low light, the album has a nocturnal pulse that lingers throughout the album’s eleven songs. “I typically record and work through ideas at night” Naomi explains of the songwriting process. “You can really experiment with things during those hours before refining them during the day.”

Some songs arrived quickly, like ‘soft dreams’, which was written in a matter of hours while Naomi’s partner slept beside them. A quiet, domestic moment held in sound. Others, like ‘she marks her own death’, demanded everything: multiple versions, endless refinement, near obsession. But it was ‘real love’ that shifted angelism from fragments into a true album. “I remember showing it to my girlfriend and a few friends and their reactions made me feel as if I was onto something fuller and more fleshed out than I'd originally thought,” Naomi recalls. “It felt like a blueprint for the whole album.”

Across angelism, girldeath has created a deeply felt, sonically ambitious body of work. One that rewards stillness and repetition, the kind of listening that doesn’t seek answers. It’s an album that never rushes, and doesn’t even need to be understood. It just asks that you sit with it awhile. What threads do appear are held gently: love, loss, self-reflection, and an unvarnished kind of tenderness.

words by tom johnson, goldflake paint