Album art for Hed / Bely by sweetcreem

Geneva DeCobert is the mastermind behind the washed out, reverb-heavy project sweetcreem. The recordings are composed completely of Geneva’s instrumentation, lyrics, and found samples from her life. Reminiscent of Youth Lagoon’s “Year of Hibernation,” the two-sided EP contains four songs, two on each half-faced album cover.

The spaces that sweetcreem enters ensnare listeners as we are guided by her gentle vocals. DeCobert says she goes into a trance for these sections, “trying to make a non verbalized feeling having into something that grips attention and makes move body.”

The release comes in the wake of mourning Rude Boy, DeCobert’s best friend. According to her, “… he and I were always two halves. Life and death, light and darkness, he and I, peace and violence.” The pairing of these concepts reflects the combination of sounds of the album.

Heavy, slow drums pull the listener through songs like “Smith,” contrasting the buzzy saw wave and tinkling synth arpeggio. This feeling of forward motion is thematic within the music, shuffling through choruses although DeCobert still has “someone stuck to shoe.”

Room-filling volume and vocal production allows a song like “Rude” to grow from its delicate, rhythmic opening into a grand and swollen lament. The harmonies of the chorus vocals create tension, which is broken masterfully by the end of the song.

Engineered by Miranda Serra of Zippah Recording, vocal layers give DeCobert’s lyrics the feeling of multiplicity, power in numbers. In “Flossvitch,” the dreamy layers of crunchy and somewhat aggressive noise contrast her lofty voice.

Hed and Bely are now available to stream, and you can come out to see sweetcreem live, September 1st at the Middle East Upstairs.